Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  As they were finishing, the children’s tutors showed up. They looked like students from the institute. The children would never have to go to a real school. Would that make it any easier for them in the end?

  The children wanted Unnerby to stay for their lessons, but Sherkaner would have none of it. “Concentrate on studying,” he said.

  And so—hopefully—the hardest part of the visit was past. Except for the babies, Underhill and Unnerby were alone back in his study in the cool ground floor of the institute. They talked for a while about Unnerby’s specific needs. Even if Sherkaner was unwilling to help directly, he really did have some bright cobbers up here. “I’d like you to talk to some of my theory people. And I want you to see our computing-machinery experts. It seems to me that some of your grunt problems would be solved if you just had fast methods for solving differential equations.”

  Underhill stretched out on the perch behind his desk. His aspect was suddenly quizzical. “Hrunk…socializing aside, we accomplished more today than a dozen phone calls could have done. I know the institute is a place you’d love. Not that you’d fit in! We have plenty of technicians, but our theory people think they can boss them around. You’re in a different class. You’re the type that can boss the thinkers around and use what ideas they have to reach your engineering goals.”

  Hrunkner smiled weakly. “I thought invention was to be the parent of necessity?”

  “Hmf. It mainly is. That’s why we need people like you, who can bend the pieces together. You’ll see what I mean this afternoon. These are people you’d love to take advantage of, and vice versa… I just wish you had come up a lot earlier.”

  Unnerby started to make some weak excuse, stopped. He just couldn’t pretend anymore. Besides, Sherkaner was so much easier to face than the General. “You know why I didn’t come before, Sherk. In fact, I wouldn’t be here now if General Smith hadn’t given me explicit orders. I’d follow her through Hell, you know that. But she wants more. She wants acceptance of your perversions. I—You two have such beautiful children, Sherk. How could you do such a thing to them?”

  He expected the other to laugh the question off, or perhaps to react with the icy hostility that Smith showed at any hint of such criticism. Instead, Underhill sat silently for a moment, playing with an antique children’s puzzle. The little wood pieces clicked back and forth in the quiet of the study. “You agree the children are healthy and happy?”

  “Yes, though Brent seems…slow.”

  “You don’t think I regard them as experimental animals?”

  Unnerby thought back to Victory Junior and her dollhouse maze. Why when he was her age, he used to fry attercops with a magnifying glass. “Um, you experiment with everything, Sherk; that’s just the way you are. I think you love your children as much as any good father. And that’s why it’s all the harder for me to imagine how you could bring them into the world out of phase. So what if only one was mentally damaged? I notice they didn’t talk of having any contemporary playmates. You can’t find any who aren’t monstrous, can you?”

  From Sherkaner’s aspect, he could tell his question had a struck home. “Sherk. Your poor children will live their whole lives in a society that sees them as a crime against nature.”

  “We’re working on these things, Hrunkner. Jirlib told you about ‘The Children’s Hour of Science,’ didn’t he?”

  “I wondered what that was all about. So he and Brent are really on a radio show? Those two could almost pass for in-phase, but in the long run somebody will guess and—”

  “Of course. If not, Victory Junior is eager to be on the show. Eventually, I want the audience to understand. The program is going to cover all sorts of science topics, but there will be a continuing thread about biology and evolution and how the Dark has caused us to live our lives in certain ways. With the rise of technology, whatever social reason there is for rigid birthing times is irrelevant.”

  “You’ll never convince the Church of the Dark.”

  “That’s okay. I’m hoping to convince the millions of open-minded people like Hrunkner Unnerby.”

  Unnerby couldn’t think what to say. The other’s argument was all so glib. Didn’t Underhill understand? All decent societies agreed on basic issues, things that meant the healthy survival of their people. Things might be changing, but it was self-serving nonsense to throw the rules overboard. Even if they lived in the Dark, there would still be a need for decent cycles of life… The silence stretched out. There was just the clicking of Sherk’s little puzzle blocks.

  Finally, Sherkaner spoke. “The General likes you very much, Hrunk. You were her dearest cobber-in-arms—but more, you were decent to her when she was a new lieutenant and it looked like her career would end on the trash pile.”

  “She’s the best. She couldn’t help when she was born.”

  “…Granted. But that’s also why she’s been making your life so hard lately. She thought that you, of all people, would accept what she and I are doing.”

  “I know, Sherk, but I can’t. You saw me today. I did my best, but your cobblies saw through me. Junior did anyway.”

  “Heh, heh. She did indeed. It’s not just her name; Little Victory is smart like her mother. But—as you say—she’s going to have to face much worse… Look, Hrunk. I’m going to have a little chat with the General. She should accept what she can get, learn a little tolerance—even if it is tolerance for your intolerance.”

  “I—that would help, Sherk. Thanks.”

  “In the meantime, we’ll need you up here more often. But you can come on your own terms. The children would like to see you, but at whatever distance you prefer.”

  “Okay. I do like them. I’m just afraid I can’t be what they want.”

  “Ha. Then finding the right distance will be their little experiment.” He smiled. “They can be pretty flexible if they look at you that way.”

  TWENTY

  In pre-Flight, Pham Trinli had been a distant curiosity to Ezr Vinh. What little he had seen of the guy seemed sullen, lazy, and probably incompetent. He was “somebody’s relative” it was the only explanation for how he had made the crew. It was only since the ambush that Trinli’s boorish, loudmouth behavior had made its impact on Ezr. Occasionally he was amusing; much more often he was loathsome. Trinli’s Watch time overlapped Ezr’s by sixty percent. When he went over to Hammerfest, there was Pham Trinli trading dirty stories with Reynolt’s techs. When he visited Benny’s booze parlor, there was Trinli with a gang of Emergents, loud and pompous as ever. It had been years—really since Jimmy Diem died—since anyone would think his behavior traitorous. Qeng Ho and Emergents had to get along, and there were plenty of Traders in Trinli’s circle.

  Today Ezr’s loathing for the man had changed to something darker. It was the once-per-Msec Watch-manager meeting, chaired as always by Tomas Nau. This was not the empty propaganda of Ezr’s fake “Fleet Management Committee.” The expertise of both sides was needed if they were to survive here. And though there was never a question of who was boss, Nau actually heeded much of the advice given at these meetings. Ritser Brughel was currently off-Watch, so this meeting would proceed without pathological overtones. With the exception of Pham Trinli, the managers were people who really could make things work.

  All had gone smoothly through the first Ksec. Kal Omo’s programmers had sanitized a batch of head-up displays for Qeng Ho use. The new interface was limited, but better than nothing. Anne Reynolt had a new Focused roster. The full schedule was still a secret, but it looked like Trixia might get more time off. Gonle Fong proposed some Watch changes. Ezr knew these were secret payoffs for various deals she had on the side, but Nau blandly accepted them. The underground economy she and Benny had masterminded was surely known to Tomas Nau…but the years had passed and he had consistently ignored it. And he has consistently benefited by it. Ezr Vinh would never have thought that free trading could add much efficiency in such a small and closed society as this little camp at L1, but it
clearly had improved life. Most people had their favored Watch companions. Many had Qiwi Lisolet’s little bonsai bubbles in their rooms. Equipment allocation was about as slick as it could be. Maybe it just showed how screwed up the original Emergent allocation system had been. Ezr still clung to the secret belief that Tomas Nau was the deepest villain he had ever known, a mass murderer, who murdered simply to advance a lie. But he was so clever, so outwardly conciliatory. Tomas Nau was more than smart enough to allow this underground trade that helped him to proceed.

  “Very well, last item.” He smiled down the length of the table. “As usual, the most interesting and difficult item. Qiwi?”

  Qiwi Lisolet rose smoothly, stopped herself with a hand on the low ceiling. Gravity existed on Hammerfest, but it was barely good enough to keep the drinking bulbs on the table. “Interesting? I guess.” She made a face. “But it’s also a very irritating problem.” Qiwi opened a deep pocket and pulled out a bundle of head-up displays—all tagged with “cleared-for-Peddler-use” seals. “Let’s try out Kal Omo’s toys.” She passed them out to the various Watch managers. Ezr took one, smiled back at her shy grin. Qiwi was still child-short, but she was as compact and nearly as tall as an average Strentmannian adult. She was no longer a little girl, or even the devastated orphan of the Relighting. Qiwi had lived Watch-on-Watch in the years after the Relight; she had aged a full year for every year that passed. Since OnOff s light had faded to a more manageable level, she’d had some time off-Watch, but Ezr could see tiny creases beginning at the corners of her eyes. She’s what now? Older than I am. The old playfulness sometimes showed even still, but she never teased Ezr anymore. And he knew the stories about Qiwi and Tomas Nau were true. Poor, damned Qiwi.

  But Qiwi Lin Lisolet had become something more than Ezr ever expected. Now Qiwi balanced mountains.

  She waited until they all were wearing their huds. Then: “You know I manage our halo-orbit around L1.” Above the middle of the table, the rockpile suddenly materialized. A tiny Hammerfest stuck out of the jumble on Ezr’s side; a taxi was just mooring on the high tower. The image was crisp, cutting precisely across the wall and people behind it. But when he turned his head quickly from the rockpile to Qiwi and back, the pile blurred slightly. The placement automation couldn’t quite keep up with the motion, and the visual fraud failed. No doubt, Kal Omo’s programmers had been forced to replace some of the optimizations. Still, what was left was close to Qeng Ho quality, the images separately coordinated in the field of each head-up display.

  Dozens of tiny red lights appeared across the surface of the rockpile. “Those are the electric-jet emplacements”—and then even more yellow spots of light—“and that is the sensor grid.” She laughed, as light and playful as he remembered. “Altogether it looks like a finite element solution grid, doesn’t it? But then, that’s just what it is, though the grid points are real machines collecting data. Anyway, my people and I have two problems. Either one of them is fairly easy: We need to keep the jumble in orbit around L1.” The jumble shrank to a stylized symbol, tracing an ever-changing Lissajous figure around the glyph L1. On one side hung Arachna; far away but on the same line was the OnOff star. “We have it set so we’re always near the sun’s limb as seen by the Spiders. It will be many years before they have the technology to detect us here… But the other goal of the stabilization is to keep Hammerfest and the remaining blocks of ocean ice and airsnow all in the shadow.” Back to the original view of the jumble, but now the volatiles were marked in blue and green. Every year that precious resource shrank, consumed by the humans and by evaporation into space. “Unfortunately these two goals are somewhat inconsistent. The rubble pile is loose. Sometimes our L1 stationkeeping causes torques and the rocks slide.”

  “The rubble quakes,” said Jau Xin.

  “Yes. Down here at Hammerfest, you feel them all the time. Without constant supervision, the problem would be worse.” The surface of the meeting table became a model of the juncture of Diamonds One and Two. Qiwi motioned across the blocks and a forty-centimeter swath of surface turned pink. “That’s a shift that almost got away from us. But we can’t afford the human resources to—”

  Pham Trinli had sat through all this in silence, his eyes squinted down in a look of angry concentration. As Nau’s original choice to manage the stabilization, Trinli had a long history of humiliation on this subject. Finally he exploded. “Crap. I thought you were going to spend some of the water, melt it into a glue you could inject between the Diamonds.”

  “We did that. It helps some, but—”

  “But you still can’t keep things settled, can you?” Trinli turned to Nau, and half rose from his chair. “Podmaster, I’ve told you before that I’m best for the job. The Lisolet girl knows how to run a dynamics program, and she works as hard as anyone—but she doesn’t have any depth of experience.” Depth of experience? How many years of hands-on does she need, old man?

  But Nau just smiled at Trinli. No matter how absurd the idiot’s contentions, Nau always invited him back. For a long time, Ezr had suspected it was some sadistic humor on the Podmaster’s part.

  “Well, then perhaps I should give you the job, Armsman. But consider, even now it would mean at least one-third time on-Watch.” Nau’s tone was courteous, but Trinli caught the dare in it. Ezr could just see the anger growing in the old man.

  “One-third?” said Trinli. “I could do it on a one-fifth Watch, even if the other crewmembers were novices. No matter how cleverly the jets are emplaced, success comes down to the quality of the guidance network. Miss Lisolet doesn’t understand all the features of the localizer devices she is using.”

  “Explain,” said Anne Reynolt. “A localizer is a localizer. We’ve been using both ours and yours in this project.” Localizes were a basic tool of any technical civilization. The tiny devices chirped their impulse codes at one another, using time of flight and distributed algorithms to accurately locate each participating device. Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile. Together they were a kind of low-level network, providing information on the orientation, position, and relative velocity of the electric jets and the rubble.

  “Not so.” Trinli smiled patronizingly. “Ours work with yours well enough, but at the price of degrading their natural performance. Here’s what the units look like.” The old man fiddled with his hand pad. “Miss Lisolet, these interfaces are worthless.”

  “Allow me,” said Nau. He spoke into the air, “here are the two types of localizers we’re using.”

  The landscape vanished, and two pieces of vacuum-rated electronics appeared on the table. No matter how often Ezr saw this sort of demonstration, it was hard to get used to. In a practiced presentation, with a predetermined display sequence, it was easy to use voice recognition to guide things. What Nau had just done was subtly beyond any Qeng Ho interface. Somewhere up in Hammerfest’s attic, one or more of his ziphead slaves was listening to every word spoken here, giving context to Nau’s words and mapping them through to the fleet’s automation or other ziphead specialists. And here were the resulting images, as quick as if Nau’s own mind contained the fleet’s entire database.

  Of course, Pham Trinli was oblivious to the magic. “Right.” He leaned closer to the equipment. “Except that these are really more than the localizers themselves.”

  Qiwi: “I don’t understand. We need a power supply, the sensor probes.”

  Trinli grinned at her, triumph dripping in his smile. “That’s what you think—and perhaps it was true in the early years when ol’ OnOff was frying everything. But now—” He reached closer and his finger disappeared into the side of the smaller package. “Can you show the localizer core, Podmaster?”

  Nau nodded. “Right.” And the image of the Qeng Ho package was cut away, component layer by component layer. In the end, all that was left was a tiny blackened fleck, not more than a millimeter across.

  Sitting next to him, Ezr caught an instant of tension in Tomas Nau. The
other was suddenly, intensely interested. The moment passed before Ezr was even sure it existed. “My, that is small. Let’s take a closer look.”

  The dustmote image swelled until it was a meter across and almost forty centimeters high. The head-up display automation painted appropriate reflections and shadows.

  “Thanks.” Trinli stood so they could all see him over the top of the lens-shaped gadget. “This is the basic Qeng Ho localizer—normally embedded in protective barriers, and so on. But see, in a benign environment—even outside in the shade—it is quite self-sufficient.”

  “Power?” said Reynolt.

  Trinli waved his hand dismissively. “Just pulse them with microwaves, maybe a dozen times a second. I don’t know the details, but I’ve seen them used in much larger numbers on some projects. I’m sure that would give finer control. As for sensors, these puppies have several simple things built in—temperature, light levels, sonics.”

  Jau Xin: “But how could Qiwi and the rest be ignorant of all this?”

  Ezr could see where it was all going, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  Trinli shrugged magnanimously. He still did not realize how far his ego had taken him. “As I’ve been saying all along: Qiwi Lin Lisolet is young and inexperienced. Coarse-grain localizers are good enough for most projects. Besides, the advanced characteristics are most useful in military work, and I wager that the texts she studies are deliberately vague on those issues. I, on the other hand, have worked as both an engineer and an armsman. Though it’s not permitted normally, the localizers are an excellent oversight facility.”

  “Certainly,” Nau said, looking thoughtful. “Localizers and attached sensors are the heart of proper security.” And these dustmotes already had sensors and independence built in. They weren’t an embedded component of a system; they could be the system itself.