Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ritser Brughel’s quarters and command post were aboard the Invisible Hand. He often wondered how the Peddlers had come up with such a perfect name, in two words expressing the essence of Security. In any case, the Hand was the most nearly undamaged of all the hulls, Qeng Ho or Emergent. The flight-crew quarters were sound. The main drive could probably sustain a one-gee thrust for several days. Since the takeover, the Hand’s comm and ECM had been refurbished to Focused standards. Here on the Invisible Hand, he was something of a god.

  Unfortunately, physical isolation was no protection against a mindrot runaway. Runaway was triggered by emotional imbalance in the Focused mind. That meant it could propagate across communications networks, though normally that only happened between closely cooperating zipheads. Back in civilization, runaway was a constant, low-level concern, just another reason for having hot swaps available. Here in the godforsaken nowhere, it was a deadly threat. Ritser had been aware of the runaway almost as quickly as Reynolt—but he couldn’t afford to shut down his zips. As usual, Reynolt gave him second-class service, but he managed. They split the snoops into small groups, and ran each separately from the others. The resulting intelligence was fragmented; their logs would require lots of later analysis. But they had missed nothing big…and eventually they would catch up with all the details.

  In the first 20Ksec, Ritser lost three snoops to the runaway. He had Omo flush them and keep the others running. He went down to Hammerfest, had a long meeting with Tomas Nau. It looked like Reynolt was going to lose at least six people, including a big hunk of her translation department. The Senior Podmaster was properly impressed with Brughel’s lower casualties. “Keep your people online, Ritser. Anne thinks the translators chose sides in that damn Spider debate, that the runaway rot was an escalation of a normal ziphead disagreement. Maybe so, but the debate was well removed from center of the translators’ Focus. Once things stabilize, I want you to go over every second of your records, comb it for suspicious events.”

  After another 60Ksec, Brughel and Nau agreed that the crisis was past, at least for the Security zips. Podsergeant Omo put the snoops back into consultation with Reynolt’s people, but via a buffered link. He began a detailed scan of the immediate past. The debacle had indeed blown away Ritser’s operation, albeit very briefly. For about one thousand seconds, they had totally lost emission security. Closer investigation showed that nothing had been beamed toward any outside system; their long-term secrecy was intact. Locally, the translators had screamed something past the controllers, but the Spiders had not noticed; not surprising, since the chaotic transmissions would have seemed like transient noise.

  In the end, Ritser was forced to conclude that the runway was simply very bad luck. But amid the trivia there were some very interesting tidbits:

  Normally Ritser stayed up on the Hand’s bridge, where he could maintain a command perspective on the L1 rubble pile and Arachna far beyond. But with Ciret and Marli helping out on Hammerfest, there were just Tan and Kal Omo to run nearly one hundred Security snoops. So today he was mucking around in the guts of the operation with Omo and Tan.

  “Vinh has tripped three flags this Watch, Podmaster. Two times during the runaway, as matter of fact.”

  As he floated in over Omo, Ritser glanced down at the zipheads on Watch. About a third were asleep in their saddles. The rest were immersed in data streams, reviewing the logs, correlating their results with Reynolt’s Focused on Hammerfest. “Okay, so what do you have on him?”

  “This is camera analysis of Reynolt’s lab and a corridor near Podmaster Nau’s residence.” The scenes flickered by quickly, highlighted where the snoops had seen exceptionable body language.

  “Nothing overt?”

  Omo’s hatchetlike face spread in a humorless smile. “Plenty that would be actionable back home, but not under the current RoE.”

  “I’ll bet.” Podmaster Nau’s Rules of Enforcement would have been reason for his instant removal anywhere in the Emergency. For more than twenty years, the Senior Podmaster had let the Peddler swine get away with their excesses, perverting law-abiding Followers in the process. It had driven Ritser to distraction at first. Now…Now he could understand. Tomas was right about so many things. They had no margin for further destruction. And letting people talk yielded a lot of information, secrets they could use when the noose was retightened. “So what’s different about this time?”

  “Analysts Seven and Eight both correlate on the last two events.” Seven and Eight were the zipheads at the end of the first row. As children they might have had names, but that was long ago and before they entered the Police Academy. Frivolous names and “Doctor” titles might be used in civilian work, but not in a serious police shop. “Vinh is intent on something that goes beyond his normal anxiety. Look at this head tracking.”

  It didn’t mean anything to Ritser, but then his job was to lead, not to understand forensic details. Omo continued, “He’s watching Trinli with great suspicion. It happens again in the corridor by the taxi locks.”

  Brughel riffled through the video index of Vinh’s visit to Hammerfest. “Okay. He fought Trinli. He harassed Trud Silipan. Lordy—” Brughel couldn’t help laughing. “—he assaulted Tomas Nau’s private whore. But you say the security flags are for eye contact and body language?”

  Omo shrugged. “The overt behavior fits with the guy’s known problems, sir. And it doesn’t come under the RoE.”

  So Qiwi Lisolet got slapped around, right on Tomas’s doorstep. Ritser found himself grinning at the irony. All these years, Tomas had fooled the little slut. The periodic mindscrubs had come to be a bright spot in Ritser’s life, especially since he saw her reaction to a certain video. Still, he couldn’t deny his envy. He, Ritser Brughel, couldn’t have maintained a masquerade, even with mindscrubs. Ritser’s own women just didn’t last. A couple of times a year, he had go back to Tomas and wheedle more playthings out of him. Ritser had used up the most attractive expendables. Sometimes he had a bit of luck, as with Floria Peres. She would have noticed Qiwi’s mindscrub for sure; chemical engineer or no, she had to be taken down. But there were limits to such good fortune…and the Exile stretched out years more ahead of him. The thought was dark and familiar, and he resolutely pushed it away.

  “Okay. So your point is, Seven and Eight figure that Vinh is hiding something that wasn’t in his consciousness before—at least not at this level of intensity.”

  Back in civilization, there’d have been no problem. They’d just bring the perp in and cut the answers out of him. Here…well, they’d had their chance to do some cutting; they had learned disappointingly little. Too many of the Qeng Ho had effective blocks, and too many couldn’t be properly infected with mindrot.

  He cycled through the highlighted incidents. “Hmm. Do you suppose he’s figured out that Trinli is really Zamle Eng?” The Peddlers were crazy; they tolerated almost any corruption, but had blood hatred for one of their own simply because he traded in flesh. Ritser’s lip turned in disgust. Pus. How far we’ve fallen. Blackmail was a fitting weapon between Podmasters, but simple terror should suffice for people like Pham Trinli. He scanned once more through Omo’s evidence. It was really frail. “Sometimes I wonder, maybe we have the trigger threshold set too low on our snoops.”

  That was something that Omo had suggested before. The podsergeant was too clever to gloat, however. “It’s possible, sir. On the other hand, if there weren’t questions left for managers to decide, there would be no need for real people.” The vision of one Podmaster ruling a universe of Focused was fantasy fiction. “You know what I wish, Podmaster Brughel?”

  “What?”

  “I wish we could bring those run-alone Qeng Ho localizers aboard Hammerfest. There’s something perverse about having worse security in our own space than we do in the Qeng Ho temp. If these incidents had happened aboard the temp, we would have had Vinh’s blood pressure, his heart rate—hell, if the localizers are on the subject’
s scalp, we’d have EEG. Between the Peddlers’ signal processors and our zipheads, we could practically read the subject’s bloody mind.”

  “Yeah, I know.” The Qeng Ho localizers were an almost magical improvement over previous standards of law enforcement. There were hundreds of thousands of the millimeter-size devices all through the Peddler temp—probably hundreds in the open areas of Hammerfest since Nau had relaxed the frat rules. All they had to do was reprogram Hammerfest’s utility system for pulsed microwave, and the localizers’ reach would be instantly extended. They could say goodbye to camera patches and similar clumsy gear. “I’ll bring this up again with Podmaster Nau.” Anne’s programmers had been studying the Peddler localizers for more than two years, futilely searching for hidden gotchas.

  In the meantime…“Well, Ezr Vinh is back aboard the temp now, with all the localizer coverage you could dream of.” He grinned at Omo. “Divert a couple more zipheads onto him. Let’s see how much an intense analysis can show.”

  Ezr got through the emergency without cracking up again. Regular reports emerged from Hammerfest. The mindrot runaway had been stopped. Xopi Reung and eight other Focused persons had died. Three more were “seriously damaged.” But Trixia was marked as “returned to service, undamaged.”

  The speculations swept back and forth across Benny’s parlor. Rita was sure the runaway was a near-random crash. “We used to get them every couple of years in my shop on Balacrea; only one time did we nail the cause. It’s the price you pay for close-coupling.” But she and Jau Xin were afraid the runaway would eliminate even delayed audio translations of “The Children’s Hour.” Gonle Fong said that didn’t matter, that Sherkaner Underhill had lost his strange debate with Pedure and so there wouldn’t be any more broadcasts to translate. Trud Silipan was gone from the discussion; he was still over on Hammerfest, maybe working for a change. Pham Trinli made up for that, spouting Silipan’s theory that Trixia had been acting out a real fight—and that had precipitated the runaway. Ezr listened to it all, numb and silent.

  His next duty was in 40Ksec; Ezr went back to his quarters early. It would be a while before he could face Benny’s again. So many things had happened, and they were all shameful or hurting or lethally mysterious. He floated in the semidarkness of his room, skewered on Hell’s rotisserie. He’d think impotently on one problem for a time…and then escape to something that soon was equally terrible, and then escape again…finally returning to the first horror.

  Qiwi. That was his shame. He had struck her twice. Hard. If Pham Trinli had not interfered, would I have gone on beating her? There was a horror opening up before him that he had never imagined. Sure, he had always been afraid that someday he would blunder, or even be a coward, but…today he had seen something in himself, something basically indecent. Qiwi had helped to put Trixia on exhibit. Sure. But she wasn’t the only one involved. And yes, Qiwi did benefit under Tomas Nau…but Lord, she’d been only a child when all this began. So why did I go after her? Because she had once seemed to care? Because she wouldn’t fight back? That was what the implacable voice in the back of his mind insisted. At bottom, maybe Ezr Vinh was not just incompetent or weak, maybe he was simply filth. Ezr’s mind danced round and round that conclusion, closing ever tighter, until he escaped out sideways to—

  Pham Trinli. That was the mystery. Trinli had acted twice yesterday, both times saving Ezr from being an even greater fool and villain. There was a crust of blood across the back of his head, where Trinli’s “clumsy” body block had smashed him into the wall. Ezr had seen Trinli in the temp’s gym. The old man made a thing of exercise, but his body wasn’t in especially good shape. His reaction time was nothing spectacular. But somehow he knew how to move, how to make accidents happen. And thinking back, Ezr remembered times before when Pham Trinli had been in the right place… The temp park right after the massacre. What had the old man actually said? It hadn’t revealed anything to the cameras, it hadn’t even tweaked Ezr’s own attention—but something he said had wakened the certainty that Jimmy Diem had been murdered, that Jimmy was innocent of all Nau claimed. Everything Pham did was loud and self-serving and incompetent, yet…Ezr thought back and forth over all the details, the things he might be seeing that others would miss. Maybe he was seeing mirages in his desperation. When problems go beyond hope of solution, insanity comes creeping. And yesterday, something had broken inside him…

  Trixia. That was the pain and the rage and the fear. Yesterday Trixia had come very close to death, her body as tortured and twisted as Xopi Reung’s. Maybe even worse… He remembered the look on her face when she came out of the MRI programmer. Trud said her linguistics ability had been temporarily detuned. Maybe that was the cause for her desperation, losing the one thing that still had meaning for her. And maybe he lied, as he suspected Reynolt and Nau and Brughel lied about many things. Maybe Trixia had been briefly deFocused and looked about her, and seen how she had aged, and realized that they had taken her life. And I may never know. I will continue to watch her year after year, impotent and raging and…silent. There had to be someone to strike against, to punish…

  And so the rotisserie cycled back to Qiwi.

  Two Ksec passed, four. Enough time to return again and again to problems that were beyond solution. This sort of thing had happened a few terrible times before. Sometimes he’d spend the whole night on the rotisserie. Sometimes he got so tired, he’d just fall asleep—and that would stop it. Tonight, the nth time thinking on Pham Trinli, Ezr got angry at the process. So what if he was crazy? If all he had were mirages of salvation, well then, grab them! Vinh got up and put on his huds. Awkward seconds were spent getting through the library access routines. He still wasn’t used to the crummy Emergent I/O interface, and they had yet to enable decent customization. But then the windows around him lit up with text from the latest report he was doing for Nau.

  So, what did he know about Pham Trinli? In particular, what did he know that had escaped the notice of Nau and Brughel? The fellow had an uncanny ability in hand-to-hand fighting—mugging, more accurately. And he cloaked the ability from the Emergents; he was playing a game with them… And after today, he must know that Vinh knew this.

  Maybe Trinli was simply an aging criminal doing his best to blend in and survive. But then what about the localizers? Trinli had revealed their secret to Tomas Nau, and that secret had increased Nau’s power a hundredfold. The tiny flecks of automation were everywhere. There on his knuckle—that might be a glint of sweat, but it also might be a localizer. The little glints and flecks could be reporting the position of his arms, some of his fingers, the angle of his head. Nau’s snoops could know it all.

  Those capabilities were simply not documented in the fleet library, even with top-level passwords. So Pham Trinli knew secrets that went deep in the Qeng Ho past. And very likely what he had revealed to Tomas Nau was just a cover for…what?

  Ezr pounded on that question for a few moments, got nowhere. Think about the man. Pham Trinli. He was an old thug. He knew important secrets above the level of Qeng Ho fleet secrets. Most likely, he had been in at the founding of the modern Qeng Ho, when Pham Nuwen and Sura Vinh and the Council of the Gap had done their work. So Trinli was enormously old in objective years. That was not impossible, nor even excessively rare. Long trading missions could take a Trader across a thousand years of objective time. His parents had had one or two friends who had actually walked on Old Earth. Yet it was highly unlikely any of them had access to the founding layers of Qeng Ho automation.

  No, if Trinli was what Ezr’s insane reasoning implied, then he would likely be a figure visible in the histories. Who?

  Vinh’s fingers tapped at the keyboard. His ongoing assignment was a good cover for the questions he wanted to ask. Nau had an insatiable interest in everything Qeng Ho. Vinh was to write him summaries, and propose research tracks for the zipheads. However mellow and diplomatic he might seem, Ezr had long ago realized that Nau was even crazier than Brughel. Nau studied in or
der to someday rule.

  Be careful. The places he really wanted to look must be fully covered by the needs of his report writing. On top of it all, he must keep up a random pattern of truly irrelevant references. Let the snoops try to find his intent in those!

  He needed a list: Qeng Ho males, alive at the beginning of the modern Qeng Ho, who were not known to be dead at the time Captain Park’s expedition left Triland. The list shrank substantially when he also eliminated those known to be far from this corner of Human Space. It shrank again when he required that they be present at Brisgo Gap. The conjunction of five booleans, the work of a spoken command or a column of keystrokes—but Ezr could not afford such simplicity. Each boolean was part of other searches, in support of things he really needed for the report. The results were scattered across pages of analysis, a name here, a name there. The orrery floating by the ceiling showed less than 15Ksec remaining before the walls of his quarters would begin to glow dawnlight…but he had his list. Did it mean anything? A handful of names, some pale and improbable. The booleans themselves were very hazy. The Qeng Ho interstellar net was an enormous thing, in a sense the largest structure in the histories of Humankind. But it was all out of date, by years or centuries. And even the Qeng Ho sometimes lied among themselves, especially where the distances were short and confusion could give commercial advantage. A handful of names. How many and who? Even scanning the list was painstakingly slow, else the hidden watchers would surely notice. Some names he recognized: Tran Vinh.21, that was Sura Vinh’s g’grandson and the male-side founder of Ezr’s own branch of the Vinh Family; King Xen.03, Sura’s chief armsman at Brisgo Gap. Xen could not have been Trinli. He was just over 120 centimeters tall, and nearly as wide. Other names belonged to people who had never been famous. Jung, Trap, Park…Park?