The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  They traversed the chamber from one narrowness to the other. When they put the GPR snout of the guns right up to the rock, the lavender echograms were much more detailed than before. There really were tunnels, mouse-sized and extending back into the rock. They went through three batteries in about five minutes, but—“But we still haven’t found an entrance!”

  “Keep looking. We know there is one.”

  “Caray, Miri! It’s just not here.”

  “You’re right.” That was William. He had crawled part way in to look at them. “Come back here. The critters jumped off the trail before it got narrow.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  William backed out, and the kids wriggled out after him. Ol’ William had been busy. He had swept the pine cones and needles away from the edges of the path. His little flashlight lay on the ground.

  But they didn’t need a flashlight to see what William had discovered. The edge of the path, which should have been black and cold, was a dim red, a redness that spread across the rock face like weird, upward-dripping blood.

  Miri dropped flat and poked around where the heat red was brightest. “Ha. I got my finger into something! Can’t find an end to it.” She pulled back…and a plume of orange followed her hand and then drifted up, its color cooling to red as it swelled and rose above them.

  There was the faint smell of burning wood.

  For a moment, they just stared at each other, the big black goggle eyes a true reflection of their inner shock.

  No more warm air rose from the hole. “We must have found an indraft,” William said.

  Both Miri and Juan were on their knees now. They looked carefully, but the goggles didn’t have the resolution to let them see the hole clearly—it was simply a spot that glowed a bit redder than anything else.

  “Use the gun, Juan.”

  He probed the rock above the hole and on either side. The tiny passage extended two feet down from the entrance, branching several times before it reached the main network of tunnels and chambers.

  “So what happened to the dungball they grabbed? It would be nice to get some pictures from in there.”

  Juan shrugged, and fed his probe gun still another battery. “They must have it in one of the farther chambers, behind several feet of rock. The crumb doesn’t have the power to get through that.”

  Juan and Miri looked at each other, and laughed. “But we have lots more breadcrumbs!” Juan felt around for the entrance hole and rolled a crumb into it. It lit up about six inches down, just past the first tunnel branch.

  “Try another.”

  Juan studied the tunnel layout for a moment. “If I throw one in just right, I bet I can carom it a couple of feet.” The crumb’s light disappeared for a moment…and then appeared as data forwarded via the first one. Yes!

  “Still no word from the one they stole,” said Miri. There were just the two locator gleams, about six inches and thirty-six inches down their respective tunnels.

  Juan touched the gun here and there to the rock face. With the GPR at high power, he could probe through a lot of sandstone. How much could he figure out from what came back? “I think I can refine this even more,” he said. Though that would surely make Miri suspicious. “That third fork in the tunnel. Something…soft…is blocking it.” A brightly reflecting splotch, coming slowly toward them.

  “It looks like a mouse.”

  “Yeah. And it’s moving between two breadcrumbs,” effectively a two-station wireless tomograph. Maybe I can combine it all. For a moment, Juan’s whole universe was the problem of meshing the “breadcrumb tomography” with the GPR backscatter. The image showed more and more detail. He blanked out for a just a second, and for a moment after that forgot to be cautious.

  It was a mouse all right. It was facing up the tunnel, toward the entrance the three humans were watching. They could even see its guts, and the harder areas that were skull and ribs and limbs. There was something stuck in its forepaw.

  The whole thing looked like some cheap graphics trick. Too bad Miri didn’t take it that way. “Okay! I’ve had it with you, Juan! One person could never work that fast. You doormat! You let Bertie and his committee—”

  “Honest, Miri, I did this myself!” said Juan, defending where he should not defend.

  “We’re getting an F on account of you, and Bertie will own all of this!”

  William had been watching with the same detachment as during Miri’s earlier accusations. But this time: “I see the picture, Munchkin, but…I don’t think he’s lying. I think he did it himself.”

  “But—”

  William turned to Juan, “You’re on drugs, aren’t you, kid?” he said mildly.

  Once a secret is outed—

  “No!” Make the accusation look absurd. But Juan floundered, wordless.

  For an instant, Miri stared open-mouthed. And then she did something that Juan thought about a lot in the times that followed. She raised her hands, palms out, trying to silence them both.

  William smiled gently. “Miriam, don’t worry. I don’t think Foxwarner is patching us into their summer release. I don’t think anyone but us knows what we’re saying here at the bottom of a canyon in thick fog.”

  She slowly lowered her hands. “But…William.” She waved at the warmth that spread up the rock face. “None of this could be natural.”

  “But what kind of unnatural is it, Munchkin? Look at the picture your friend Juan just made. You can see the insides of the mouse. It’s not animatronic.” William ran a twitchy hand through his hair. “I think somebody in the bioscience labs hereabouts really did have an accident. Maybe these creatures aren’t as smart as humans…but they were smart enough to escape, and fool—who was it that was poking around here in January?”

  “Feretti and Voss,” Miri said in a small voice.

  “Yes. Maybe just hiding down here when the bottom was under water was enough to fool them. I’ll bet these creatures have just a little edge over ordinary lab mice. But a little edge can be enough to change the world.”

  And Juan realized William wasn’t talking about just the mice. “I don’t want to change the world,” he said in a choked voice. “I just want to have my chance in it.”

  William nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Miri looked back and forth at them. What Juan could see of her expression was very solemn.

  Juan shrugged. “It’s okay, Miri. I think William is right. We’re all alone here.”

  She leaned a little toward him. “Was it Bertie who got you into this?”

  “Some. My mother has our family in one of the distributed framing-hams. I showed my part of it to Bertie last spring, after I flunked Adaptability. Bertie shopped it around as an anonymous challenge. He came back with a custom drug. What it does—” Juan tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a rattle. “—most people would think that what it does is a joke. See,” he tapped the side of his head, “it makes my memory very very good. Everyone thinks human memory doesn’t count for much anymore. People say, ‘No need for eidetic memory when your clothes’ data storage is a billion times bigger.’ But that’s not the point. Now I can remember big data blocks perfectly, and I have my wearable put hierarchial tags on all the stuff I see. So I can communicate patterns back to my wearable just by citing a few numbers. It gives me this incredible advantage in setting up problems.”

  “So Bertie is your great friend because you are his super tool?” Her voice was quiet and outraged, but the anger was no longer directed at Juan.

  “No! I’ve studied the memory effect. The idea itself came from analysis of my own medical data. Even now that we have the gimmick, only one person in a thousand could be affected by it at all. There’s no way Bertie could have known beforehand that I was special.”

  “Ah. Of course,” she said, and was silent. Juan hated it when people did that, agreed with what you said and then waited for you to figure out why you had just made a fool of yourself…Bertie is just very good with connections. He ha
d connections everywhere, to research groups, idea markets, challenge boards. But maybe Bertie had figured out how to do even better: How many casual friends did Bertie have? How many did he offer to help with custom drug improvements? Most of that would turn out to be minor stuff, and maybe those friendships would remain casual. But sometimes, Bertie would hit the jackpot. Like with me.

  “But Bertie is my best friend!” I will not blubber.

  “You could find other friends, son,” said William. He shrugged. “Back before I lost my marbles, I had a gift. I could make words sing. I would give almost anything to get that back. And you? Well, however you came by it, the talent you have now is a marvelous gift. You are beholden to no one other than yourself for it.”

  Miri said softly. “I—I don’t know, Juan. Custom meds aren’t illegal like twentieth century drugs—but they are off-limits for a reason. There’s no way to do full testing on them. This stuff you’re taking could—”

  “I know. It could fry my mind.” Juan put his hands to his face, and ran into the cold plastic of his goggles. For a moment, Juan’s mind turned inward. All the old fear and shame rose up…and balanced against the strange surprise that out of the whole world, this old man could understand him.

  But even here, even with his eyes closed, his contacts were still on, and Juan saw the virtual gleam of the breadcrumbs. He stared passively for several seconds, and then surprise began to eat through his funk. “Miri…they’re moving.”

  “Huh?” She had been paying even less attention than he had. “Yes! Down the tunnels, away from us.”

  William moved close to the mouse hole, and pressed his ear against the stone wall. “I’ll bet our little friends are taking your dungballs to wherever the first one went.”

  “Can you get some pictures from them, Juan?”

  “…Yes. Here’s one.” A thermal glimpse of a glowing tunnel floor. Frothy piles of something that looked like finely shredded paper. Seconds passed, and a virtual gleam showed dimly through the rock, “There’s the locator beacon of the first crumb.” It was five feet deeper in the rock. “Now it has a node to forward through.”

  “We could lose them, too.”

  Juan pushed past William, and tossed two more breadcrumbs down the hole. One rolled a good three feet. The other stopped after six inches—and then began moving “on its own.”

  “The mice are stringing nodes for us!” All but the farthest locator beacon were glowing high-rate bright. Now there were lots of pictures, but the quality was poor. As the crumbs warmed in the hot air of the tunnels the images showed very little detail except for the mice themselves: paws and snouts and glowing eyes. “Hey, did you see the splinter sticking out of that poor thing’s paw?”

  “Yes, I think that’s the one I saw before. Wait, we’re getting a picture from the crumb they stole to begin with.” At first, the data was a jumble. Still another picture format? Not exactly. “This picture is normal vision, Miri!” He finished the transformation.

  “How—?” Then she gave a sharp little gasp.

  There was no scale marker, but the chamber couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet across. To the eye of the breadcrumb it was a wide, high-ceilinged meeting room, crowded with dozens of white-furred mice, their dark eyes glittering by the light of a…fire…in the middle of the hall.

  “I think you have your ‘A,’ Miriam,” William said softly.

  Miri didn’t answer.

  Rank upon rank of mice, crouched around the fire. Three mice stood at the center, higher up—tending the flame? It wobbled and glowed, more like a candle than a bonfire. But the mice didn’t seem to be watching the fire as much as they were the breadcrumb. Bertie’s little breadcrumb was the magical arrival at their meeting.

  “See!” Miri hunched forward, her elbows on her knees. “Foxwarner strikes again. A slow flame in a space like that…those ‘mice’ should all be dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  The breadcrumbs were not sending spectral data, so who could say? Juan visualized the tunnel system. There were other passages a little higher up, and he had data on the capacity of the inlets and outlets. He thought a few seconds more and gave the problem to his wearable. “No…actually, there is enough ventilation to be safe.”

  Miri looked up at him. “Wow. You are fast.”

  “Your Epiphany outfit could do it in a instant.”

  “But it would’ve taken me five minutes to pose the problem to my Epiphany.”

  Another picture came in, firelight on a ceiling.

  “The mice are rolling it closer to the fire.”

  “I think they’re just poking at it.”

  Another picture. The crumb had been turned again, and now was looking outwards, to where three more mice had just come in from a large side entrance…rolling another breadcrumb.

  But the next picture was a blur of motion, a glimpse of a mostly empty meeting chamber, in thermal colors. The fire had been doused.

  “Something’s stirred them up,” said William, listening again at the stone wall. “I can actually hear them chittering.”

  “The dungballs are coming back this way!” said Miri.

  “The mice are smart enough to understand the idea of poison.” William’s voice was soft and wondering. “Up to a point, they grabbed our gifts like small children. Then they noticed that the dungballs just kept coming…and someone raised an alarm.”

  There were still pictures, lots of them, but they were all thermal IR, chaotic blurs; the mice were hustling. The locator gleams edged closer together, some moving toward an entrance about three feet above the gully floor. The others were approaching the first hole.

  Juan touched the probe gun against the wall and pulsed the rock in several places. He was getting pretty good at identifying the flesh-and-blood reflections. “Most of the mice have moved away from us. It’s just a rearguard that’s pushing out the breadcrumbs. There’s a crowd of them behind the crumbs that are coming out by your head, William.”

  “William, quick! The FedEx mailer. Maybe we can trap some when they come out!”

  “I…yes!” William stood and pulled the FedEx mailer from his bag. He tilted the open carton toward the mouse hole.

  A second later there was a faint scrabbling noise, and William’s arms moved with that twitchy speed of his. Juan had a glimpse of fur and flying breadcrumbs.

  William slapped the container shut, and then stumbled backwards as three more mice came racing out of the lower hole. For a fleeting instant, their glowing blue eyes stared up at the humans. Miri made a dive for them, but they had already fled down the path, oceanward. She picked herself up and looked at William. “How many did you get?”

  “Four! The little guys were in such a rush they just jumped out at me.” He held the mailer close. Juan could hear tiny thumping noises from inside it.

  “That’s great,” said Miri. “Physical evidence!”

  William didn’t reply. He just stood there, staring at the carton. Abruptly he turned and walked a little way up the trail, to where the path widened out and the brush and pines didn’t cover the sky. “I’m sorry, Miriam.” He tossed the mailer high into the air.

  The box was almost invisible for a moment, and then its ring of jets lit up. Tiny, white-hot spikes of light traced the mailer’s path as it wobbled and swooped within a foot of the rock wall. It recovered, and slowly climbed, still wobbling. Juan could imagine four very live cargo items careening around inside it. Silent to human ears, the mailer rose and rose, jets dimming in the fog. The light was a pale smudge when it drifted out of sight behind the canyon wall.

  Miri stood, her arms reaching out as if pleading. “Grandfather, why?”

  For a moment, William Gu’s shoulders slumped. Then he looked across at Juan. “I bet you know, don’t you, kid?”

  Juan stared in the direction the mailer had taken. Four mice, rattling around in a half-broken mailer. He had no idea just now what security was like at the FedEx minihub, but it was at the edge of the back coun
try, where the mail launchers didn’t cause much complaint. Out beyond Jamul…the mice could have their chance in the world. He looked back at William and just gave a single quick nod.

  THERE WAS VERY LITTLE TALK as they climbed back out of the canyon. Near the top, the path was wide and gentle. Miri and William walked hand in hand. There were spatters of coldness on her face that might have been tears, but there was no quaver in her voice. “If the mice are real, we’ve done a terrible thing, William.”

  “Maybe. I’m sorry, Miriam.”

  “…But I don’t think they are real, William.”

  William made no reply. After a moment, Miri said, “You know why? Look at that first picture we got from the mouse meeting hall. It’s just too perfectly dramatic. The chamber doesn’t have furniture or wall decorations, but it clearly is a meeting hall. Look how all the mice are positioned, like humans at an old town meeting. And then at the center—”

  Juan’s eyes roamed the picture as she spoke. Yes. There in the center—almost as though they were on stage—stood three large white mice. The biggest one had reared up as it looked at the imager. It had one paw extended…and the paw grasped something sharp and long. They had seen things like that in other pictures and never quite figured them out. In this natural-light picture, the tool—a spear?—was unmistakable.

  Miri continued on, “See, that’s the tip-off, Foxwarner’s little joke. A real, natural breakthrough in animal intelligence would never be such a perfect movie poster. So. Later tonight, Juan and I will turn in our local team report, and Foxwarner will ’fess up. By dinnertime at the latest, we’ll be famous.”

  And my own little secret will be outed.

  Miri must have understood Juan’s silence. She reached out and took his hand, dragging the three of them close together. “Look,” she said softly. “We don’t know what—if anything—Foxwarner recorded of us. Even now, we’re in thick fog. Except for the mice themselves, our gear saw no sensors. So either Foxwarner is impossibly good, or they weren’t close snooping us.” She gestured up the path. “Now in a few more minutes we’ll be back in the wide world. Bertie and maybe Foxwarner will be wisping around. But no matter what you think really happened tonight—” Her voice trailed off.