Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  Some had left port less than a century earlier, coming in from Canberra and Torma. There were ships from Strentmann and Kielle, from worlds with ethnicities that by now were almost different species. Some had launched from so far away that they had only heard of the Meeting by radio. There were three ships from Old Earth. Not all the Attendees were true Traders; some were government missions hoping for the solutions in Pham’s message. Perhaps a third of the visitors’ departure worlds would have fallen from civilization in the time it took for voyage and return.

  Such a meeting could not be moved or postponed. The opening of Hell itself could not successfully deflect it. Still, decades out from port, Pham had known that Hell was cracking open for the people of Namqem.

  Pham’s Flag Captain was only forty years old. He had seen a dozen worlds, and he should have known better. But he had been born on Namqem. “They’ve been civilized since before you first showed up out of the Dark, sir. They know how to make things work. How can this be?” He looked disbelievingly at the analysis that had arrived with Sura Vinh’s latest transmission.

  “Sit down, Sammy.” Pham kicked a chair out from the wall, gestured for the other to settle himself. “I’ve read the reports, too. The symptoms are classic. The last decade, the rate of system deadlocks has steadily increased throughout Namqem. See here, thirty percent of business commuting between the outer moons is in locked state at any given time.” All the hardware was in working order, but the system complexity was so great that vehicles could not get the go-ahead.

  Sammy Park was one of Pham’s best. He understood the reasons behind all the synthetic beliefs of the new Qeng Ho—and he still embraced them. He could make a worthy successor to Pham and Sura—maybe better than Pham’s oldest children, who were often as cautious as their mother. But Sammy was seriously rattled: “Surely the governance of Namqem understands the danger? They know everything Humankind has ever learned about stability—and they have better automation than we! Surely, in another few dozen Msecs we’ll hear that they’ve reoptimized.”

  Pham shrugged, not admitting to his own disbelief. Namqem was so good, for so long. Aloud he said, “Maybe. But we know they’ve had thirty years to work a fix.” He waved at Sura’s report. “And still the problems get worse.” He saw the look on Park’s face, and softened his voice. “Sammy, Namqem has had peace and freedom for almost four thousand years. There’s not another Customer civilization in all Human Space that can say that. But that’s the point. Without help, even they can’t go on forever.”

  Sammy’s shoulders hunched down. “They’ve avoided the killing disasters. They haven’t had war plagues or nuclear war. The governance is still flexible and responsive. There are just these Lord-be-damned technical problems.”

  “They are technical symptoms, Sammy, of problems I’m sure the governance understands very well.” And can’t do a thing about. He remembered back to the cynicism of Gunnar Larson. In a way this conversation was rumbling down the same dead-end street. But Pham Nuwen had had a lifetime to think of solutions. “The flexibility of the governance is its life and its death. They’ve accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point…”

  “But we knew—I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins.”

  Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still—“In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand.” If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

  “Okay, I know.” Sammy looked away, and Pham synched his huds to follow what the younger man was seeing: Tarelsk and Marest, the two largest moons. Two billion people on each. They were gleaming disks of city lights as they slid across the face of their mother world—which itself was the largest park in Human Space. When the end finally came to Namqem, it would be a steep, swift collapse. Namqem solar system was not as naturally desolate as the pure asteroidal colonies of the early days of the Space Age…but the megalopolis moons required high technology to sustain their billions. Large failures there could easily spread into a system-wide war. It was the sort of debacle that had sterilized more than one of Humankind’s homes. Sammy watched the scene, peaceful and wondrous—and now years out-of-date. And then he said, “I know. This is everything you’ve been telling people, all the years I’ve been with the Qeng Ho. And for centuries before. Sorry Pham. I always believed…I just never thought my own birthplace would die, so soon.”

  “I…wonder.” Pham looked across the command deck of his flag vessel and, in smaller windows, the command decks of the other thirty ships in his fleet. Here in midvoyage, there were only three or four people on each bridge. It was the dullest work in the universe. But the Nuwen fleet was one of the largest coming to the Meeting. More than ten thousand Qeng Ho slept in the holds of his ships. They had departed Terneu just over a century ago, and flew in the closest formation that wouldn’t interfere with their ramfields. The farthest command deck was less than four thousand light-seconds from Pham’s flag. “We’re still twenty years’ travel time from Namqem. That’s a lot of time if we choose to spend it on-Watch. Maybe…this is an opportunity to prove that what I’ve been talking about can actually work. Namqem will likely be chaos by the time we arrive. But we are help from outside their planetary trap, and we are arriving in enough numbers to make a difference.”

  They were sitting on the command deck of Sammy’s ship, the Far Regard. This bridge was almost busy, with five of the thirty command posts occupied. Sammy looked from post to post, and finally back at Pham Nuwen. Something like hope was spreading across his face. “Yes…the whole reason for the Meeting can be illustrated.” On the side he was running scheduling programs, already caught up in the idea. “If we use contingency supplies, we can support almost a hundred on-Watch per ship, all the way to Namqem. That’s enough to study the situation, come up with action plans. Hell, in twenty years, we should be able to coordinate with the other fleets, too.”

  Sammy Park was all Flag Captain now. He stared into his calculations, twiddling the possibilities. “Yes. The Old Earth fleet is less than a quarter light-year from us. Half of all the Attendees are less than six light-years from us now, and of course that distance is decreasing. What about Sura and the Qeng Ho already in-system?”

  Sura had put down roots over the centuries, but “Sura and company have their own resources. She’ll survive.” Sura understood the wheel of fate, even if she didn’t believe it could be broken. She had moved her headquarters off Tarelsk a century before; Sura’s “temp” was a hoary palace in the asteroid belt. She would guess what Pham was about to try. The wave front of her analysis was probably headed in their direction even now. Maybe there really was a Lord of All Trade. There was certainly an Invisible Hand. The Meeting at Namqem would mean more than even he had imagined.

  Year on year, the fleet of fleets converged upon Namqem. Five thousand threads of light, fireflies visible across light-years—thousands of light-years to decent telescopes. Year on year, the flares of their deceleration became tighter, a fine ball of thistledown in the windows of every arriving ship.

  Five thousand ships; more than a million human beings. The ships held machines that could slag worlds. The ships held libraries and computer nets… And all together they were not a puff of thistledown compar
ed to the power and resources of a civilization like Namqem. How could a puff of thistledown save a falling colossus? Pham had preached his answer to that question in person and across the Qeng Ho network. Local civilizations are all isolated traps. A simple disaster could kill them, but a little outside help might lead them to safety. And for the nonsimple cases—like Namqem—where generations of clever optimization finally crushed itself, even those disasters depended on the closed-system nature of sessile civilizations. A governance had too few choices, too many debts, and in the end it would be swept away by barbarism. An outside view, a new automation, that was something the Qeng Ho could supply. That was what Pham claimed would make the difference. Now he was going to get a chance to prove his point, not just argue it. Twenty years was not too much time to get ready.

  In twenty years, Namqem’s once gentle decline had gone beyond inconvenience, beyond economic recession. The governance had fallen three times now, each time replaced by a regime designed to be “more effective”—each time opening the way to more radical social and technical fixes, ideas that had failed on a hundred other worlds. And with each downward step, the plans of the approaching fleets became more precise.

  People were dying now. A billion kilometers out from Namqem world, the fleets saw the beginnings of Namqem’s first war. Literally saw it with their naked eyes: the explosions were in the gigatonne range, the destruction of a competing governance that had seceded with two-thirds of the outer planets’ automated industry. After the detonations, only one-third of that industry remained, but it was firmly in control of the megalopolitan regimes.

  Flag Captain Sammy Park reported at a meeting: “Alqin is trying to evacuate to the planetary surface. Maresk is on the verge of starvation; the pipeline from the outer system will empty out just a few days before we arrive.”

  “The stump governance on Tarelsk seems to think they’re still running a going concern. Here is our analysis…” The new speaker’s Nese was fluent; they had had twenty years now to synch their common language. This Fleet Captain was a young…man…from Old Earth. In eight thousand years, Old Earth had been depopulated four times. Without the existence of the daughter worlds, the human race would have gone extinct there long ago. What lived on Earth was strange now. None of their kind had been this far out from the center of Human Space before. But now, as fleets made their final approach into the Namqem system, the Old Earth ships were barely ten light-seconds from Pham’s flag. They had participated as much as anyone in setting up what they all were calling the Rescue.

  Sammy waited politely to be sure the other was finished. Chatting at many seconds’ remove took a special discipline. Then he nodded. “Tarelsk will probably be the site of the first megadeaths, though we’re not sure of the precise cause.”

  Pham was sitting in the same meeting room as Sammy. He took advantage of his location to butt in before the other’s time slot was truly ended. “Give us your summary on Sura’s situation, Sammy.”

  “Trader Vinh is still in the main asteroid belt. She is about two thousand light-seconds from our present location.” It would still be a while before Sura could participate firsthand. “She’s supplied a lot of useful background intelligence, but she’s lost her temp and many of her ships.” Sura owned a number of estates in the belt; no doubt she was safe for the moment. “She recommends we shift the venue of the Grand Meeting to Brisgo Gap.”

  Seconds drifted slowly past as they waited for comment from farther out. Twenty seconds. Nothing from the Old Earth fleet; but that could be politeness. Forty seconds. The Strentmannian Fleet Captain took the floor, naturally enough a woman: “Never heard of it. Brisgo Gap?” She held up her hand, indicating she was not giving up her speaking slot. “Okay, I see. A density-wave feature in their asteroid belt.” She gave a sour laugh. “I suppose that’s a place that won’t be subject to contention. Very well, we could pick a longitude close to Trader Vinh’s holdings and all meet there…after we accomplish the Rescue.”

  They had come across dozens, some of them hundreds, of light-years. And now their Grand Meeting would be in empty space. As best he could across the time delay between them, Pham had argued with Sura about this suggestion. Meeting in a nowhere place was a confession of failure. When the Far Regard’s speaking turn came, Pham took the floor. “Sure, Trader Vinh is right in picking an out-of-the-way corner of the Namqem system for the Meeting. But we’ve had years to plan for the Rescue. We have our five thousand ships. We have action strategies for each of the megalopolis populations and for those already moved down to Namqem world. I agree with Fleet Captain Tansolet. I propose that we execute our plan before we meet at this wherever-it-is gap.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  There was a war on. Three separate megalopolitan populations were at risk. The resources of almost a thousand ships were dedicated to suppressing the ragtag military that had grown up in the chaos. The lander resources of two hundred ships were sent down to the surface of Namqem itself. The world had been a manicured park for several thousand years—but now it would become the home of billions. Part of one megalopolis population was already down on the surface.

  More than two thousand ships were headed for Maresk. The regime there was almost nonexistent…but starvation was only a few Msecs away. Much of Maresk might be saved by a combination of subtlety and brute cargo-hauling power.

  Tarelsk still had an active governance, but it was like no governance in the history of the Namqem system. This was something out of darker times on other worlds, when rulers mouthed words about reconciliation—and willingly killed by the millions. The Tarelsk governance was an unplumbed madness.

  One of Sammy’s analysts said, “Beating them down will be almost like an armed conquest.”

  “Almost?” Pham looked up from the approach plots; every crewman was wearing full-press coveralls and hoods. “Hell, this is the real thing.” In the simplest case, the Qeng Ho rescue mission was three coordinated coups. If they succeeded, it would not be remembered that way. If they succeeded, each operation would be a little miracle, salvation that the locals could not provide for themselves. Perhaps ten times in all the histories had there been real interstellar war across more than a couple of light-years. Pham wondered what his father would have thought if he could have known what his throwaway son would one day accomplish. He turned back to the approach plots. The fastest would take 50Ksec to reach Tarelsk. “What’s the latest?”

  “As expected, the Tarelsk governance isn’t buying our arguments. They consider us invaders, not rescuers. And they aren’t forwarding what we say to the Tarelsk population.”

  “Surely the people know, though?”

  “Maybe not. We’ve had three successful flybys.” The robots had been dropped off 4Msec before, recon darts that could make almost one-tenth lightspeed. “We only got a millisecond look, but what we saw is consistent with what Sura’s spies are telling us. We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.”

  Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child’s rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. “So now they have to run everything.” The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind… The only trouble was, no despot had the resources to plan every detail in his society’s behavior. Not even planet-wrecker bombs had as dire a reputation for eliminating civilizations. The rulers of Tarelsk had regressed far indeed. Pham leaned back in his seat. “Okay. This makes things easier and riskier. We’ll take the least-time course; these guys will kill everyone if they are just left to themselves. Follow drop schedule nine.” That meant wave after wave of unmanned devices. The first would be fine-targeted pulse bombs, trying to blind and numb Tarelsk’s eyes and automation. Closer in, the drops would be diggers, flooding the moon’s urban areas with Qeng Ho automation. If Pham’s plans worked, Terelsk’s automation would be confronted with another system, quite alien to, and uncontrollable by, the rulers’ ubiquitous law enforcement. />
  Pham’s fleet made a low-altitude pass by Namqem world. The maneuver kept them out of Tarelsk’s direct fire for a few thousand seconds. In itself, it was a kind of first. Civilized systems didn’t like large fusion rockets—much less starship drives—operating in the middle of urban areas. Heavy fines, even ostracism or confiscation were the price of such violations. For once, it was nice to give the finger to all of that. Pham’s thirty were decelerating at torch max, more than one gee, and had been for Ksecs. They swept over Namqem’s middle north latitudes at less than two hundred kilometers—and moving at almost two hundred kilometers per second. There was a glimpse of forests, of manicured deserts, of the temporary cities that housed the refugees from Alqin. And then they were heading out, their trajectory scarcely bent by the planetary mass. It was like something out of a children’s graphic, a planet literally whipping past their viewpoint.

  Just kilometers ahead of them, space was alive with hellish light, and only some of it was defensive fire. This was the real reason why high-speed flight in an urban area was insane. The space near Namqem world had once been an orderly scene of optimized usage. There had even been talk of setting up orbital towers. That optimization had been successfully resisted by the governance, but even so, low space was saturated with thousands of vehicles and satellites. In the best of times, microcollisions had created so much junk that garbage collection was the largest industry in near-Namqem space.

  That orderly commerce had ended many Msecs earlier. The Qeng Ho armada had not precipitated this chaos, but they were rushing through it with bomb flares and ramfields that stretched out and sideways for hundreds of kilometers. Pham’s ramfields swept across millions of tonnes of junk and freighters and governance military vehicles… Their coming had been announced; perhaps there were no innocent casualties. What was left behind was as tumbled and charred as any battlefield.