Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

The Children came up here sometimes, but in the warmth of day. The youngest didn’t understand about cemeteries. The oldest didn’t want to understand, but they didn’t want to forget their friends, either.

  Ravna mostly came after dark, and when she felt the darkest. By that measure, tonight was most definitely the time for a visit. She walked along the main path, her shoes crunching the frost-stiffened moss. Night in the arctic autumn, even here near the channel currents, ranged from cold to deathly frigid. Tonight was relatively mellow. The clouds had come in around sunset, stacking deeper and deeper over the land, trapping the day’s warmth. The hillside breeze had dropped to nothing more than a faint, chill breath. Oobii said there would be rain a little later, but for now the sky was dark and dry and there was clear air down to the waters of the inner channel. Here and there, she could see lights on the north end of Hidden Island. Very close by, there were occasional glows of lavender. Glowbugs. The tiny insects put on a big show only two or three nights a year, and usually earlier in the autumn than this. As she walked on, there were more of the lavender glints. The occasional glimmer was not enough to light her way … but they were welcome.

  Rows of graves lay on either side of the cemetery’s main path. Each place was marked by a headstone carved with a name and a star. The design was modeled after something she’d found in Oobii’s classical human archive. The little four-pointed stars were an early religious symbol, perhaps the most common in human histories, though she was not clear on the details. There were 151 graves in these four rows, almost all the inhabitants of the cemetery. One hundred and fifty-one Children, from less than a year old to sixteen, all murdered on the same summertime night, burned to death as they lay in coldsleep. The heather south of town was called Murder Meadows, but the actual killing field lay beneath the center of the New Castle, the central chamber where the Children’s Lander still sat upon charred moss.

  Ravna had known none of those Children. They had died before she even knew they existed. Her pace slowed. There could have been more dead Children here; many of the surviving coldsleep coffins had suffered fire damage. Reviving Timor had taught her what she could safely do. Only a few of the original kids still slept in their caskets under the castle, along with the four miscarriages from the new generation, and two accidents; someday she would wake them all. Someday she would fix Timor, too.

  Strange as it might seem, there were also a few Tines buried in the cemetery. Originally, that had been just twelve packs who had fully died in the Battle on Starship Hill. In recent years, Johanna’s Fragmentarium for Old Members had begun to change that—much to the chagrin of redjacket factions.

  There was a thirteenth pack, buried just before Pham’s place: six little markers, each with the glyph of its one member, then a bigger one that marked the group: Ja-que-ram-a-phan and then the pack’s taken name, Scriber. Scriber was another whom Ravna had never met, but she knew his story from both Pilgrim and Johanna: Scriber, the gallant, foolish inventor who had persuaded Pilgrim to befriend Johanna, the pack that Johanna had reviled, and who had been murdered for his efforts. Ravna knew that Jo had her own midnight trips up here, too.

  Just ten years, and so many people to remember. Sjana and Arne Olsndot. Skroderider Blueshell. Amdi was one of the few packs who came up here regularly—always with Jefri, of course.

  Ravna had reached the huge glacial boulder that marked the end of the path. Pham’s stone made a shoulder in the hill, protecting the children’s graves from the north winds. But tonight, the air was almost still. The glowbugs didn’t need to hide in the heather. In fact, they were thickest in the air around Pham’s grave, so many that their pulsing was in sync. Every few seconds, there was a silent surge of lavender that washed around her like a welcoming tide. She had seen them in such numbers only once before. That had also been around Pham’s grave. It must be the flowers that she had planted here, now grown high. Ravna and the Children had put flowers round their classmates’ graves, but they had never taken quite so well as here. That was strange, considering Pham’s northern exposure.

  Ravna turned off the end of the path, walking around to a special spot at the side of the rock. Funny thing about religion. At the Top of the Beyond, religion was the scary, practical matter of creating and dealing with gods. Down here in the Slow Zone, where humankind had been born … Down Here, religion was a naturally grown hodgepodge, mostly the slave of local evolutionary biology.

  Still, it’s amusing how quickly our weakness makes us embrace these old ways.

  It was dead dark between the slow pulses of lavender light, but Ravna knew exactly where she stood. She reached out and set her palm on a familiar stretch of smooth granite. It was so cold … and then after a long moment, her body heat warmed it. Pham Nuwen had been a little like that. Quite possibly, he had never existed but for the year or so that she knew him. Quite possibly, the Power that created Pham had made him as a joke, stocked with bogus memories of an heroic past. Whatever the truth, in the end Pham had made of himself a real hero. Sometimes when she came up here, it was to pray for Pham. Not tonight. Tonight was one of the despairing nights. Worse, tonight there was an objective reason for despair. But Pham had overcome worse.

  She silently leaned against the rock for a time.

  And then she heard footsteps crunching on the main path. She turned away from Pham’s stone, suddenly very glad that she hadn’t been sobbing. She wiped her face and slipped the hood of her jacket a little forward.

  The approaching figure blocked an occasional light from up in New Castle town. She thought for a moment that this was Jefri Olsndot. Then the glowbugs pulsed together, a lavender haze that swept out around her and revealed the other. Not Jefri. Nevil Storherte was not quite Jefri’s height, and in all frankness, he was not as pretty-boy handsome.

  “Nevil!”

  “Ravna? I—I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

  “That’s okay.” She didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or just pleased to see a sympathetic face suddenly pop out of the void. “Whatever are you doing up here?”

  Nevil’s hands were fumbling nervously with each other. He glanced over her head at the huge boulder. Then the light dimmed and there was just his voice. “I lost my best friends on Murder Meadows. Leda and Josj. I should care about all my classmates, but they were special.… I come up sometimes to, you know, to see them.”

  Sometimes Ravna had to tell herself that the Children weren’t all children anymore. Sometimes they told her that themselves.

  “I understand, Nevil. When things get bad, I like to come up here, too.”

  “Things are going badly? I know there’s lots to worry about, but your idea with the ship’s cargo bay has been a wonder.”

  Of course, he wouldn’t know about Woodcarver’s anger, much less about the terrible screw-up with her own special surveillance of Flenser.

  Nevil’s voice continued, puzzled. “You shouldn’t keep to yourself if there are problems, Ravna. That’s what we have the Executive Council for.”

  “I know. But I’m afraid that on this…” I’ve messed up so badly that certain Council members are the last people I can talk to. The glowbugs pulsed again and she saw Nevil’s intelligent, questioning gaze. Since Johanna and Nevil had been together—which was also since Nevil had been on the Council—she had rarely chatted with the fellow except when the two young people were together. Somewhere deep down she’d been afraid that Johanna might take the interest wrong. Tonight, that thought almost made her laugh. My problems are so much worse than all I used to worry about. “There are things that can’t really be brought up in the full Council.”

  She couldn’t see his face now. Would he condemn her for plotting out of the Council’s sight? But his voice was sympathetic. “I think I understand. It’s a very hard job you have. I can wait to hear—”

  “That’s not what I meant. Do you have a minute, Nevil? I’d like to … I’d really like to get some advice.”

  “Why sure.” A diffident laugh. “T
hough I’m not sure how much my advice is really worth.”

  Pulse of lights. It was as if they were suddenly standing in a field of lavender flowers, surely the most beautiful glowbug show she’d ever seen, so bright it lit the huge boulder almost to the top. Ravna scrambled up to a perch she had discovered years ago, and waved Nevil to a spot almost as comfortable. He nodded, clambered up in the dying light. The boy—the man—was sure-footed. He settled on the rock, half a meter down from her and almost a meter away. Good. Any crying on his shoulder would be safely metaphorical.

  They sat silently for a moment. Then Nevil said, “It’s about the Disaster Study Group, isn’t it?”

  “It started with the Disaster Study Group. That’s where I first realized how totally I was messing up.”

  “That was my mess-up, and Johanna’s. We should be your objective pipeline to what our people are—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know Johanna has beaten herself up about that. But the DSG was only the beginning.” And then Ravna found herself letting go about the problems that had been weighing her down. It felt so good, and after a few minutes she realized this wasn’t just because it gave her a chance to say what she had said to no one previously. In fact, Nevil actually had intelligent questions, and insights that came close to being workable advice. He understood instantly why Woodcarver was so upset about the converting the cargo bay into a meeting place.

  “The New Meeting Place is the best thing that has happened in years, Ravna. But I can see what you’re saying. The effect on Woodcarver is a negative, but that just makes it that much more important—not to retreat on the New Meeting Place—but to make it something that Woodcarver wants to buy into.”

  It was the sort of thing that Ravna had thought, but hearing him say the words was heartwarming. She caught a glimpse of his face as he finished the sentence. Nevil Storherte had always had a kind of brash diffidence, and now she realized what that contradiction amounted to. Nevil Storherte had charisma. Even untrained and unplanned, it fairly oozed from him.

  “Your mother was the chief administrator at the High Lab, wasn’t she?”

  “Actually, it was my dad. Mom was the vice chief, or chief of vice when she was feeling mischievous.”

  Ravna had her low opinion of the Straumers’ High Lab. At best it was good intentions gone cosmically wrong. But the Lab had been the pinnacle of the Straumer civilization. It had been mind-boggling hubris, but it had also enlisted the best and the brightest of their entire civilization. Very likely there had been other heroes besides the parents of Johanna and Jefri. “Your Dad must have been a management superstar.” A more talented leader than anyone on this poor world.

  Nevil gave an embarrassed laugh. “If you go by the selection process, he was. I remember how it dragged on through most of my grade school years, all the hoops my folks had to jump through. But Dad said it didn’t matter, that there were so many geniuses at the Lab that ‘administration’ was more like herding cats.… You know? You had cats at Sjandra Kei, didn’t you?”

  Ravna smiled in the darkness. “Oh, yes. Cats go back a lot farther than Sjandra Kei.”

  Nevil Storherte might have only childhood recollections to go by, but he’d grown up among real leaders. And obviously, he had the magic touch himself. And stupid me, all self-pitying, ignoring resources that were here all the time. She took a deep breath and launched into something more than the shallow confidences of a minute before: “You know, Nevil, the most important thing in the world—maybe in this part of the Galaxy—is our raising a civilization here in time to face the Blighter fleet.”

  “I agree.”

  “But the DSG thing has made me realize how much our long-term goal distracted me from what’s happening in the here and now. I fear I’ve screwed up so badly that we may lose the main game before it ever begins.”

  Silence, but then in a moment of pale light she saw that it was a thoughtful, attentive silence, and she continued: “Nevil, I’m trying to correct my mistakes, but what I’ve tried so far has had unhappy side-effects.”

  “Woodcarver’s reaction to the New Meeting Place?”

  “That’s just one.”

  “Maybe I can help on that. I don’t have a private channel to Woodcarver, but Johanna certainly does. And I’ll bet my friends can think of changes to the New Meeting Place that will convince Woodcarver that it honors the whole of the Domain.”

  “Yes! That would be great.” Thank you. “Let me fly the other changes by you. Most are a lot scarier to me than the New Meeting Place seemed.” Maybe you can show me which is dead wrong and which can somehow be made to work. One by one she described her ideas for reforms, and for every one Nevil’s reaction was like warm sunlight, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but always illuminating.

  About instituting formal democracy: Nevil was in favor. “Yes, that’s something we must do, and fairly soon now that so many of us are adults. But I think it’s something that has to grow up naturally, not imposed from above.”

  “But the only traditions the Children—I mean you all—have experienced are embedded in heavy automation and large marketplaces. How can the idea come from within?”

  Nevil chuckled. “Yeah, lots of nonsense can emerge too. But … I trust my classmates. They have good hearts. I’ll talk this around. Maybe we can use the New Meeting Place to model how things were handled in the most successful of the Slow Zone democracies. And figure out how to do it without offending Woodcarver!”

  About Ravna moving out of Oobii: Surprisingly, Nevil was almost as uneasy about this suggestion as she was. “We need you aboard Oobii, Ravna. Anybody who thinks about the question knows that you’re the only person who knows how to use the planning tools there. If we’re going to raise civilization before we die of old age, we need you there.” He was silent for a moment. “On the other hand, you’re right in fearing that this angers people who don’t think things through—and it’s an irritant for everyone sitting out in the cold. We Children were born into a comfortable civilization. Now that’s been lost—except where we see it sitting, gleaming green on Starship Hill. So maybe it makes sense for you to move out for a while. But choose the time, some turning point where it gains the greatest good will. If you stay out, our highest priority will have to be getting you proper communications back with Oobii.”

  “Okay. So we should begin planning for just when to make the move. Can you—”

  “Yes. I’ll check around, but very quietly. I suggest you don’t discuss this with others. I’ll bet that it’s the sort of thing that once suggested becomes a popular imperative.”

  And then there was the hardest, scariest item: the priority for medical research. And here, Nevil’s reaction was the most surprising and comforting of all. “You mean shift resources from the general technology program, Ravna? In the long run, wouldn’t that slow everything, including bioscience?”

  Ravna nodded. “Y-yes. Basically, we need to build our own computers for process control and create the networks between them. Then all the rest of technology will take off; prolongevity will be easy. But in the meantime, you kids will age. Pre-technological ageing is just dying, withering, year by year. I can already see it in some of the oldest Children. I look younger than some of them. It’s a little like the problem of my living the good life in Oobii—but it looks much uglier.”

  “I—” Nevil seemed to be struggling with himself. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been doing okay, but then I probably have a naturally healthy body type. I think this is a very serious future problem. The good news is that among the kids I know well—which is most everybody—this is not currently a major source of complaint.”

  “Really? I had been so afraid—” I’ve been seeing monsters everywhere since the DSG raised its ugly head.

  “I suggest you continue with your best long-term research plan. But think about having a general meeting soon, where you explain the changes and your development schedule.”

  “Okay.” Ravna nodded. “Right. Right.” These
were her reforms, but with a big dose of constructive common sense. “We could do it in the New Meeting Place after you get it properly rebuilt.”

  “Yes. I should have something by early winter. Whenever after that you feel—”

  “Good,” she said. “The sooner the better.” This was progress on almost all fronts. Somehow that brought her back to the debacle that had made this night so desolate. She hesitated for just a second. Her special surveillance of Flenser had always been the secret beyond telling. Now? Now she finally had someone to share it with.

  “There’s one other thing, Nevil.” She explained about Flenser and her spy infestation.

  He gave a low whistle. “I had no idea that Beyonder surveillance tech could work here.”

  “Well, it turns out that in the long run it was a disaster,” she said, and then described the latest session, under Flenser’s castle. She heard her voice rising. This part felt as bad as ever. “And confessing to Woodcarver on top of everything else—I just can’t do it!”

  The breeze had risen ever so slightly, and the glowbugs had fallen out of synch. Now they were only isolated spots of light. There was the occasional tap of raindrops on her hood, the beginnings of the shower Oobii had predicted.

  Nevil was quiet for a long moment. Finally he said. “Yeah, that’s a problem. But the surveillance itself—I think that was the right thing. Johanna has always been very suspicious of that pack. And from what you said, you got years of valid intel.”

  “Some unknown number of years.”

  “True. But my Dad used say that there’s no way to be a successful leader without taking considered risks. And that means occasionally doing things that fail miserably. The point is to make what you can of the successes—then revisit the failures. When Woodcarver is happy about things, then come back to her with this.”

  Ravna looked up into darkness, got a couple big raindrops in the face for her trouble. She licked at the cold water and suddenly was laughing. “Meantime, the weather is telling us to adjourn this summit meeting.”