by Vernor Vinge
“Fools! The Mailman is your natural ally. The Feds will kill you! Don’t you underst—”
The voice stopped in midshriek, as Erythrina zeroed the currently running simulator. No other took up the task. There was a silence, an…absence…throughout. Erythrina glanced at Mr. Slippery, and the two continued their search through the enemy’s territory. This data space was big, and there could be many more copies of DON hidden in it. But without the resources they presently held, the simulator could have no power. It was clear to both of them that no effective ambush could be hidden in these unmoving ruins.
And they had complete copies of DON.MAC to study. It was easy to trace the exact extent of his infection of the system. The two moved systematically, changing what they found so that it would behave as its original programmers had intended. Their work was so thorough that the Feds might never realize just how extensively the Mailman and his henchman had infiltrated them, just how close he had come to total control.
Most of the areas they searched were only slightly altered and required only small changes. But deep within the military net, there were hundreds of trillions of bytes of program that seemed to have no intelligible function yet were clearly connected with DON’s activities. It was apparently object code, but it was so huge and so ill organized that even they couldn’t decide if it was more than hash now. There was no possibility that it had any legitimate function; after a few moments’ consideration, they randomized it.
At last it was over. Mr. Slippery and Erythrina stood alone. They controlled all connected processing facilities in near-Earth space. There was no place within that volume that any further enemies could be lurking. And there was no evidence that there had ever been interference from beyond.
It was the first time since they had reached this level that they had been able to survey the world without fear. (He scarcely noticed the continuing, pitiful attempts of the American military to kill his real body.) Mr. Slippery looked around him, using all his millions of perceptors. The Earth floated serene. Viewed in the visible, it looked like a thousand pictures he had seen as a human. But in the ultraviolet, he could follow its hydrogen aura out many thousands of kilometers. And the high-energy detectors on satellites at all levels perceived the radiation belts in thousands of energy levels, oscillating in the solar wind. Across the oceans of the world, he could feel the warmth of the currents, see just how fast they were moving. And all the while, he monitored the millions of tiny voices that were now coming back to life as he and Erythrina carefully set the human race’s communication system back on its feet and gently prodded it into function. Every ship in the seas, every aircraft now making for safe landing, every one of the loans, the payments, the meals of an entire race registered clearly on some part of his consciousness. With perception came power; almost everything he saw, he could alter, destroy, or enhance. By the analogical rules of the covens, there was only one valid word for themselves in their present state: they were gods.
“…we could rule,” Erythrina’s voice was hushed, self-frightened. “It might be tricky at first, assuring our bodies protection, but we could rule.”
“There’s still the Mailman—”
She seemed to wave a hand, dismissingly. “Maybe, maybe not. It’s true we still are no closer to knowing who he is, but we do know that we have destroyed all his processing power. We would have plenty of warning if he ever tries to reinsinuate himself into the System.” She stared at him intently, and it wasn’t until some time later that he recognized the faint clues in her behavior and realized that she was holding something back.
What she said was all so clearly true; for as long as their bodies lived, they could rule. And what DON.MAC had said also seemed true: they were the greatest threat the “forces of law and order” had ever faced, and that included the Mailman. How could the Feds afford to let them be free, how could they even afford to let them live, if the two of them gave up the power they had now? But—“A lot of people would have to die if we took over. There are enough independent military entities left on Earth that we’d have to use a good deal of nuclear blackmail, at least at first.”
“Yeah,” her voice was even smaller than before, and the image of her face was downcast. “During the last few seconds I’ve done some simulating on that. We’d have to take out four, maybe six, major cities. If there are any command centers hidden from us, it could be a lot worse than that. And we’d have to develop our own human secret-police forces as folks began to operate outside our system…Damn. We’d end up being worse than the human-based government.”
She saw the same conclusion in his face and grinned lopsidedly. “You can’t do it and neither can I. So the State wins again.”
He nodded, “reached” out to touch her briefly. They took one last glorious minute to soak in the higher reality. Then, silently, they parted, each to seek his own way downward.
It was not an instantaneous descent to ordinary humanity. Mr. Slippery was careful to prepare a safe exit. He created a complex set of misdirections for the army unit that was trying to close in on his physical body; it would take them several hours to find him, far longer than necessary for the government to call them off. He set up preliminary negotiations with the Federal programs that had been doing their best to knock him out of power, telling them of his determination to surrender if granted safe passage and safety for his body. In a matter of seconds he would be talking to humans again, perhaps even Virginia, but by then a lot of the basic ground rules would be automatically in operation.
As per their temporary agreements, he closed off first one and then another of the capabilities that he had so recently acquired. It was like stopping one’s ears, then blinding one’s eyes, but somehow much worse since his very ability to think was being deliberately given up. He was like some lobotomy patient (victim) who only vaguely realizes now what he has lost. Behind him the Federal forces were doing their best to close off the areas he had left, to protect themselves from any change of heart he might have.
Far away now, he could sense Erythrina going through a similar procedure, but more slowly. That was strange; he couldn’t be sure with his present faculties, but somehow it seemed that she was deliberately lagging behind and doing something more complicated than was strictly necessary to return safely to normal humanity. And then he remembered that strange look she had given him while saying that they had not figured out who the Mailman was.
One could rule as easily as two!
The panic was sudden and overwhelming, all the more terrible for the feeling of being betrayed by one so trusted. He struck out against the barriers he had so recently allowed to close in about him, but it was too late. He was already weaker than the Feds. Mr. Slippery looked helplessly back into the gathering dimness, and saw…
…Ery coming down toward the real world with him, giving up the advantage she had held all alone. Whatever problems had slowed her must have had nothing to do with treachery. And somehow his feeling of relief went beyond the mere fact of death avoided—Ery was still what he had always thought her.
He was seeing a lot of Virginia lately, though of course not socially. Her crew had set up offices in Arcata, and twice a week she and one of her goons would come up to the house. No doubt it was one of the few government operations carried out face-to-face. She or her superiors seemed to realize that anything done over the phone might be subject to trickery. (Which was true, of course. Given several weeks to himself, Pollack could have put together a robot phone connection and—using false ids and priority permits—been on a plane to Djakarta.)
There were a lot of superficial similarities between these meetings and that first encounter the previous spring:
Pollack stepped to the door and watched the black Lincoln pulling up the drive. As always, the vehicle came right into the carport. As always, the driver got out quickly, eyes flickering coldly across Pollack. As always, Virginia moved with military precision (in fact, he had discovered, she had been promoted out of the Army
to her present job in DoW intelligence). The two walked purposefully toward the bungalow, ignoring the summer sunlight and the deep wet green of the lawn and pines. He held the door open for them, and they entered with silent arrogance. As always.
He smiled to himself. In one sense nothing had changed. They still had the power of life and death over him. They could still cut him off from everything he loved. But in another sense…
“Got an easy one for you today, Pollack,” she said as she put her briefcase on the coffee table and enabled its data set. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Oh?” He sat down and watched her expectantly.
“The last couple of months, we’ve had you destroying what remains of the Mailman and getting the National program and data bases back in operation.”
Behind everything, there still stood the threat of the Mailman. Ten weeks after the battle—the War, as Virginia called it—the public didn’t know any more than that there had been a massive vandalism of the System. Like most major wars, this had left ruination in everyone’s camp. The US government and the economy of the entire world had slid far toward chaos in the months after that battle. (In fact, without his work and Erythrina’s, he doubted if the US bureaucracies could have survived the Mailman War. He didn’t know whether this made them the saviors or the betrayers of America.) But what of the enemy? His power was almost certainly destroyed. In the last three weeks Mr. Slippery had found only one copy of the program kernel that had been DON.MAC, and that had been in nonexecutable form. But the man—or the beings—behind the Mailman was just as anonymous as ever. In that, Virginia, the government, and Pollack were just as ignorant as the general public.
“Now,” Virginia continued, “we’ve got some smaller problems—mopping-up action, you might call it. For nearly two decades, we’ve had to live with the tuppin vandalism of irresponsible individuals who put their petty self-interest ahead of the public’s. Now that we’ve got you, we intend to put a stop to that:
“We want the True Names of all abusers currently on the System, in particular the members of this so-called coven you used to be a part of.”
He had known that the demand would eventually come, but the knowledge made this moment no less unpleasant. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“Can’t? Or won’t? See here, Pollack, the price of your freedom is that you play things our way. You’ve broken enough laws to justify putting you away forever. And we both know that you are so dangerous that you ought to be put away. There are people who feel even more strongly than that, Pollack, people who are not as soft in the head as I am. They simply want you and your girl friend in Providence safely dead.” The speech was delivered with characteristic flat bluntness, but she didn’t quite meet his eyes as she spoke. Ever since he had returned from the battle, there had been a faint diffidence behind her bluster.
She covered it well, but it was clear to Pollack that she didn’t know if she should fear him or respect him—or both. In any case, she seemed to recognize a basic mystery in him; she had more imagination than he had originally thought. It was a bit amusing, for there was very little special about Roger Pollack, the man. He went from day to day feeling a husk of what he had once been and trying to imagine what he could barely remember.
Roger smiled almost sympathetically. “I can’t and I won’t, Virginia. And I don’t think you will harm me for it—Let me finish. The only thing that frightens your bosses more than Erythrina and me is the possibility that there may be other unknown persons—maybe even the Mailman, back from wherever he has disappeared to—who might be equally powerful. She and I are your only real experts on this type of subversion. I bet that even if they could, your people wouldn’t train their own clean-cut, braided types as replacements for us. The more paranoid a security organization is, the less likely it is to trust anyone with this sort of power. Mr. Slippery and Erythrina are the known factors, the experts who turned back from the brink. Our restraint was the only thing that stood between the Powers That Be and the Powers That Would Be.”
Virginia was speechless for a moment, and Pollack could see that this was the crux of her changed attitude toward him. All her life she had been taught that the individual is corrupted by power: she boggled at the notion that he had been offered mastery of all mankind—and had refused it.
Finally she smiled, a quick smile that was gone almost before he noticed it. “Okay. I’ll pass on what you say. You may be right. The vandals are a long-range threat to our basic American freedoms, but day to day, they are a mere annoyance. My superiors—the Department of Welfare—are probably willing to fight them as we have in the past. They’ll tolerate your, uh, disobedience in this single matter as long as you and Erythrina loyally protect us against the superhuman threats.”
Pollack felt a great sense of relief. He had been so afraid DoW would be willing to destroy him for this refusal. And since the Feds would never be free of their fear of the Mailman, he and Debby Charteris—Erythrina—would never be forced to betray their friends.
“But,” continued the cop, “that doesn’t mean you get to ignore the covens. The most likely place for superhuman threats to resurface is from within them. The vandals are the people with the most real experience on the System—even the Army is beginning to see that. And if a superhuman type originates outside the covens, we figure his ego will still make him show off to them, just as with the Mailman.
“In addition to your other jobs, we want you to spend a couple of hours a week with each of the major covens. You’ll be one of the ‘boys’—only now you’re under responsible control, watching for any sign of Mailman-type influence.”
“I’ll get to see Ery again!”
“No. That rule still stands. And you should be grateful. I don’t think we could tolerate your existence if there weren’t two of you. With only one in the Other Plane at a time, we’ll always have a weapon in reserve. And as long as we can keep you from meeting there, we can keep you from scheming against us. This is serious, Roger: if we catch you two or your surrogates playing around in the Other Plane, it will be the end.”
“Hmm.”
She looked hard at him for a moment, then appeared to take that for acquiescence. The next half-hour was devoted to the details of this week’s assignments. (It would have been easier to feed him all this when he was in the Other Plane, but Virginia—or at least DoW—seemed wedded to the past.) He was to continue the work on Social Security Records and the surveillance of the South American data nets. There was an enormous amount of work to be done, at least with the limited powers the Feds were willing to give him. It would likely be October before the welfare machinery was working properly again. But that would be in time for the elections.
Then, late in the week, they wanted him to visit the Coven. Roger knew he would count the hours; it had been so long.
Virginia was her usual self, intense and all business, until she and her driver were ready to leave. Standing in the carport, she said almost shyly, “I ran your Anne Boleyn last week…It’s really very good.”
“You sound surprised.”
“No. I mean yes, maybe I was. Actually I’ve run it several times, usually with the viewpoint character set to Anne. There seems to be a lot more depth to it than other participation games I’ve read. I’ve got the feeling that if I am clever enough, someday I’ll stop Henry and keep my head!”
Pollack grinned. He could imagine Virginia, the hard-eyed cop, reading Anne to study the psychology of her client-prisoner—then gradually getting caught up in the action of the novel. “It is possible.”
In fact, it was possible she might turn into a rather nice human being someday.
But by the time Pollack was starting back up the walk to his house, Virginia was no longer on his mind. He was going back to the Coven!
A chill mist that was almost rain blew across the hillside and obscured the far distance in shifting patches. But even from here, on the ridge above the swamp, the castle looked different:
heavier, stronger, darker.
Mr. Slippery started down the familiar slope. The frog on his shoulder seemed to sense his unease and its clawlets bit tighter into the leather of his jacket. Its beady yellow eyes turned this way and that, recording everything. (Altogether, that frog was much improved—almost out of amateur status nowadays.)
The traps were different. In just the ten weeks since the War, the Coven had changed them more than in the previous two years. Every so often, he shook the gathering droplets of water from his face and peered more closely at a bush or boulder by the side of the path. His advance was slow, circuitous, and interrupted by invocations of voice and hand.
Finally he stood before the towers. A figure of black and glowing red climbed out of the magma moat to meet him. Even Alan had changed: he no longer had his asbestos T-shirt, and there was no humor in his sparring with the visitor. Mr. Slippery had to stare upward to look directly at his massive head. The elemental splashed molten rock down on them, and the frog scampered between his neck and collar, its skin cold and slimy against his own. The passwords were different, the questioning more hostile, but Mr. Slippery was a match for the tests and in a matter of minutes Alan retreated sullenly to his steaming pool, and the drawbridge was lowered for their entrance.
The hall was almost the same as before: perhaps a bit drier, more brightly lit. There were certainly more people. And they were all looking at him as he stood in the entranceway. Mr. Slippery gave his traveling jacket and hat to a liveried servant and started down the steps, trying to recognize the faces, trying to understand the tension and hostility that hung in the air.
“Slimey!” The Limey stepped forward from the crowd, a familiar grin splitting his bearded face.
“Slip! Is that really you?” (Not entirely a rhetorical question, under the circumstances.)
