by Vernor Vinge
“Tunç, you lived closer to the Extinction than anyone else. What do you think caused it?”
The spacer sat back, crossed his arms. “That’s what they all ask…Ah, Wil Brierson, if I only knew! I tell them I don’t know. And they go away, seeing each his own theory reflected in my story.” He seemed to realize the answer was not going to satisfy. “Very well, my theories. Theory Alpha: Possible it is that mankind was exterminated. What Bil found in the Charon catacombs is hard to explain any other way. But it can’t be like Juan Chanson says. Bil had it better: Anything that could bump off the intellect nets in Earth/Luna would needs be superhuman. If it’s still around, no brave talk will save us. That’s why Bil Sánchez and his little colony dropped out. Poor man, he was frightened of what might happen to anything bigger.
“And Theory Beta: This is what Yelén believes, and probably Della too—though she is still so shy, I can’t tell for sure. Humankind and its machines became something better, something…unknowable. And I saw things that fit with that, too.
“Ever since the Peace War there have been more or less autonomous devices. For centuries, folks had been saying that machines as smart as people were just around the corner. Most didn’t realize how unimportant such a thing would be. What was needed was greater than human intelligence. Between our processors and ourselves, my era was achieving that.
“My own company was small; there were only eight of us. We were backward, rural; the rest of humanity was hundreds of light-seconds away. The larger spacing firms were better off. Their computers were correspondingly bigger, and they had thousands of people linked. I had friends at Charon Corp and Stellation Inc. They thought we were crazy to stay so isolated. And when we visited their habitats, when the comm lag got to less than a second, I could see what they meant. There was power and knowledge and joy in those companies…And they could plan circles around us. Our only advantage was mobility.
“Yet even these corporations were fragments, a few thousand people here and there. By the beginning of the twenty-third, there were three billion people in the Earth/Luna volume. Three billion people and corresponding processing power—all less than three light-seconds apart.
“I…it was strange, talking to them. We attended a marketing conference at Luna in 2209. Even linked, we never did understand what was going on.” He was quiet for a long moment. “So you see, either theory fits.”
Wil was not going to let him off that easily. “But your project—you say it would have meant faster-than-light travel. Is there any evidence what became of that?”
Tunç nodded. “Bil Sánchez visited the Dark Companion a couple times. It’s the same dead thing it always was. There’s no sign it was ever modified. I think that scared him even more than what he found at Charon. I know it scares me. I doubt my accident was enough to scuttle the plan: our project would have given humanity a gate to the entire Galaxy…but it was also mankind’s first piece of cosmic engineering. If it worked, we wanted to do the same to a number of stars. In the end, we might have built a small Arp object in this arm of the Galaxy. Bil thought we’d been ‘uppity cockroaches’—and the real owners finally stepped on us…
“But don’t you be buying Theory Alpha just yet. I said the Singularity was a mirrored thing. Theory Beta explains it just as well. In 2207, we were the hottest project at Stellation Inc. They put everything they had into renting those easements around the sun. But after 2209, the edge was gone from their excitement. At the marketing conference at Luna, it almost seemed Stellation’s backers were trying to sell our project as a frivolity.”
Tunç stopped, smiled. “So you have my thumbnail sketch of Great Events. You can get it all, clearer said with more detail, from Yelén’s databases.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do you like listening to others so much, Wil Brierson, that you visit me first?”
Wil grinned back. “I wanted to hear you firsthand.” And I still don’t understand you. “I’m one of the earlier low-techs, Tunç. I’ve never experienced direct connect—much less the mind links you talk about. But I know how much it hurts a high-tech to go without a headband.” All through Marta’s diary, that loss was a source of pain. “If I understand what you say about your time, you’ve lost much more. How can you be so cool?”
The faintest shadow crossed Tunç’s face. “It’s not a mystery, really. I was nineteen when I left civilization. I’ve lived fifty years since. I don’t remember much of the time right after my rescue. Yelén says I was in a coma for months. They couldn’t find anything wrong with my body; just no one was home.
“I told you my little company was backward, rural. That’s only by comparison with our betters. There were eight of us, four women, four men. Maybe I should call it a group marriage, because it was that, too. But it was more. We spent every spare gAu on our processor system and the interfaces. When we were linked up, we were something…wonderful. But now all that’s memories of memories—no more meaningful to me than to you.” His voice was soft. “You know, we had a mascot: a poor, sweet girl, close to anencephalic. Even with prosthesis she was scarcely brighter than you or I. Most of the time she was happy.” The expression on his face was wistful, puzzled “And most of the time, I am happy, too.”
19
Then there was Marta’s diary. He had started reading it as a casual cross-check on Yelén and Della. It had become a dark addiction, the place he spent the hours after his late-night arguments with Yelén, the hours after returning from his field trips.
What might have happened if Wil had been less a gentleman the night of the Robinson party? Marta was dead before he really knew her; but she looked a little like Virginia…and talked like her…and laughed like her. The diary was the only place where he could ever know her now. And so every night ended with new gloom, matched only by the dreams of morning.
Of course Marta found the West End mines bobbled. She stayed a few months, and left some billboards. It was not safe country. Packs of doglike creatures roamed. At one point she was trapped, had to start a grass fire and play mirror tag with the dogs among the bobbles. Wil read that part several times; it made him want to laugh and cry in the same breath. For Marta, it was just part of staying alive. She moved northwards, into the foothills of the Kampuchean Alps. That was where Yelén found her third cairn.
Marta reached the Peacer bobble two years after she was marooned. She had walked and sailed around the Inland Sea to do it. The last six hundred kilometers had been a climb over the Kampuchean Alps. She was still an optimist, yet her words were sometimes tinged with self-mockery. She had started out to walk halfway around the world, and ended up less than two thousand kilometers north of where she started. Despite her year’s layover, the shattered bones in her foot had not healed perfectly. Till she was rescued (her usual phrasing) she would walk with a limp. At the end of a long day’s walk she was in some pain.
But she had plans. The Peacer bobble was at the center of a vitrified plain 150 kilometers across. Even now, not much life had returned. Her first walk in, she carried all her food on the travois.
<< The bobble isn’t super large, maybe three hundred meters across. But its setting is spectacular, Lelya; I had not remembered the details. It’s in a small lake bordered by uniform cliffs. Concentrically around those cliffs are rings of ridges. I climbed to the edge of the cliffs and looked across at the bobble. My reflection looked back and we waved at each other. With its moat and the ringwall, it looks like a jewel in a setting. Equally spaced along the wall are five smaller gems—the bobbles around our lookout equipment. Whoever—whatever—marooned me has locked them up, too. But for how long? Those five were supposed to have a very high flicker rate. I still can’t believe anyone could subvert our control systems for a jump of longer than a few decades.
<< Wouldn’t it be a joke if I were rescued by the Peacers! They thought they were making a fifty-year jump to renewed dominion. What a shock it would be to come out on an empty world, and find exactly one taxpayer left. Amusing, but I’d rather
be rescued by you, Lelya…
<< The jewel’s setting is cracked in places. There’s a waterfall coming into the lake on the south side. The water exits through a break in the north wall. It’s very clear; I can see fish in the lake. There are places where the cliff has collapsed. It looks like it could make decent soil. This is probably the most habitable spot in the whole destruction zone. If I have to stop, Lelya, I think this is really the best place it could happen. It’s the most likely to be monitored; it’s at the center of a glazed flatland that should be easy to mark up. (Do you think our L5 autons would respond to KILROY IS HERE written in letters a kilometer long?)
<< So. This will be my base, forever till I’m rescued. I think I can make it a nice place to live, Lelya. >>
And Marta did. Through the first ten years she made steady improvements. Five times she trekked out of the glazed zone, sometimes for necessities like seed and wood, later to import some friends: she hiked three hundred kilometers north, to a large lake. There were fishermonkeys on that lake. She understood their matriarchal scheme now. It wasn’t hard to find displaced trios wandering the shores, looking for something bigger than they that walked on two legs. The fishers loved the ringlake. By year twelve, there were so many that some left every year down the river.
From her cabin high on the ringwall she watched them by the hour:
<< Back and forth in water and bobble there are reflections of the ringwall and my cabin and our bobbled monitors. The fishers love to play with their reflections. Often they swim against its surface. I’ll bet they feel the reflected body heat, even through their pelts. I wonder what mythology they have about the kingdom beyond the mirror…Yes, Lelya. Sentiment is one thing, fantasy another. But, you know, my fishers are smarter than chimpanzees. If I’d seen them before we left civilization, I’d have bet they would evolve human intelligence. Sigh. After all our travels, I know better. In the short term, the marine adaptation is more profitable. Another five megayears, they’ll be as agile as penguins—and not much brighter. >>
Marta gave names to the friendliest, and the weirdest. There was always a Hewey and a Dewey and a Lewey. Others she named after humans. Wil found himself chuckling. Over the years, there were several Juan Chansons and Jason Mudges—usually the most compulsive chitterers. There was also a succession of Della Lus—all small, pale, shy. And there was even one W. W. Brierson. Wil read that page twice, a trembling smile on his lips. Wil the fishermonkey was black-furred and large, even bigger than a dominant female. He could have run the whole show, but kept mostly to himself and watched everyone else. Every so often his reserve broke and he gave a great screeching display, rushing along the edge of the ringwall and slapping his sides. Like the first Dewey, he was odd man out, and especially friendly to Marta. He spent more time with her than any of them. They all played at imitating her, but he was the most successful. She actually got some useful work out of him, pulling small bundles. His most impressive game was the building of miniature versions of the pyramidal cairn Marta used to store the completed portion of her diary. Marta never said he was her favorite, yet she did seem fond of him. He disappeared on her last big expedition, around year fifteen.
<< I’ll never name one of my little friends after you, Lelya. The fishers live only ten or fifteen years. It’s always sad when they go. I don’t want to go through that with a fisher named Yelén. >>
As the years passed, Marta concentrated on the diary. This was where the words piled into the millions. She had lots of advice for Yelén. There were some interesting revelations: It had been Phil Genet who persuaded Yelén to raise the Peacer bobble while the NMs were in realtime. It had been Phil Genet who was behind the ash-shoveling incident. Genet consistently argued that the key to success lay in the explicit intimidation of the low-techs. Marta begged Yelén not to take his advice again. << We will be hated enough, feared enough, even if we act like saints. >>
In the middle decades, her writing was scarcely a diary at all, but a collection of essays and stories, poems and whimsy. She spent at least as much time with her sketches and paintings. There were dozens of paintings of the ringlake and bobble, under every kind of lighting. There were landscapes done from sketches she had made on her trips. There were portraits of many of the fishers, as well as pictures of Marta herself. In one, the artist knelt at the edge of the ringlake, smiling at her own reflection as she painted it.
It came to Wil that though there were periods of depression, and physical pain, and occasional moments of stark terror, most of the time Marta was having a good time. She even said so:
<< If I’m rescued, all this becomes a diversion, a few decades on top of the two centuries I have already lived. If I’m not…well, I know you’ll be back sometime. I want you to know that I missed you, but that there were pleasures. Take all the pictures and poems as my evidence and as my gift. >>
It was not a gift for W. W. Brierson. He tried to read it straight through, but the afternoon came when he couldn’t go on. Someday he would read of those happy, middle times. Perhaps someday he could smile and laugh with her. Just now, all he felt was a horrid need to follow Marta Qen Korolev through her last years. Even as he skipped the data set forward, he wondered at himself. Unlike Marta, he knew how it all ended, yet he was forcing himself to see it all again through Marta’s eyes. Was there some crazy part of him that thought that by reading her words he could take some of the pain from her onto himself?
More likely, this was like his daughter Anne’s reaction to The Worms Within. The movie had been in a festival of twentieth-century film that came with the kid’s new data set. It turned out that part of the festival was horror movies from the 1990s. The old USA had been at the height of its power and wealth then; for some perverse reason, slash-and-splash had its greatest flowering the same decade. Wil wondered if they would have spent so much time inventing blood and gore if they had known what was waiting for them just around the corner in the twenty-first; or maybe they feared such a future, and the gore was their way of knocking wood. In any case, Anne rushed out of her room after the first fifteen minutes, almost hysterical. They trashed the video, but she couldn’t get the story out of her mind. Unknown to Wil and Virginia, she bought a replacement and every night watched a little more—just enough to make her sick again. Afterwards she said she kept watching it—even though it got more and more horrible—because there had to be something that would happen that would make up for the wounds she’d already suffered. Of course, there was no such redemption. The ending was even more imaginatively grotesque than she feared. Anne had been depressed and a little irrational for months afterwards.
Wil grimaced. Like daughter like father. And he didn’t even have Anne’s excuse; he knew how this one ended.
In those last years, Marta’s life slowly darkened. She had completed her great construction, the sign that should alert any orbital monitors. It was a clever scheme: She had journeyed out of the glazed zone, to where a few isolated jacarandas grew. She gathered the spiders she found on the display webs and took them into the desolation. By this time she had discovered the relation of those webs to tree and spider reproduction. She set spiders and seeds at ten carefully selected sites along a line from the center of the glazed zone. Each was on a tiny stream; at each she had broken through the glaze and developed a real soil. Over the next thirty years, the spiders and their sprouts did most of the construction. The seedlings spread a small way down the streams, but not as much as ordinary plants. The spiders saw the faraway display webs of their brethren and thousands of seeds were deposited on the path between, each with a complement of arachnid paratroopers.
In the end, she had the vast green-and-silver arrow that did eventually alert an orbiter. But a problem came with that line of trees. They broke the glaze, made a bridge of soil from her base to the outside. The jacs and spiders were awesome defenders of their territory, but not perfect ones—especially when strung thin. Other plants infested the sides of their run. With those plants came herbiv
ores.
<< The little buggers have added a couple of hours’ work to each day, Lelya. And some of my favorite fruits I can’t grow at all now. >>
Ten or even twenty years into the abandonment, this would have been an inconvenience. At thirty-five years, Marta’s health was beginning to fail. Competing with the rabbity thieves was a slowly losing proposition for her.
<< Somewhere in a cairn on the far side of the sea, I said some very foolish things. Didn’t I figure an unaided human lived about a century? And then I said something about being conservative and expecting I could last only seventy-five years. What a laugh.
<< My foot has never gotten better, Lelya. I walk with a crutch now, and not very fast. Most of the time, my joints hurt. It’s funny what not feeling good does to your attitude and your notion of time. I can scarcely believe there was a day when I expected to walk to Canada. Or that just fifteen years ago I still hiked out of the glazed zone regularly. Lelya, it’s a major effort to climb down to the lake now. I haven’t done it for weeks. I may not do it again. But I have a rain cistern…and the fishers are always happy to visit me up here. Besides, I don’t like to see my reflection in the lake anymore. I’m not doing any more self-portraits, Lelya.
<< Is this what it was like for people before decent medical care? The failed dreams, the horizons that shrink always inwards? It must have taken guts to do all they did. >>
Two years later:
<< Today the neighborhood went to hell. I have a pack of near-dogs camped just over the ringwall. They look a lot like the ones at the mines, though these are smaller. In fact, they’re kind of cute, like big puppies with pointy ears. I’d like to kill the lot of them. An un-Marta-like thought, granted, but they’ve driven the fishers away from my cabin. They killed Lewey. I got a couple of the little murderers with my pike. Since then, they’ve been extremely wary of me. Now I carry a pike and knife when I’m out of doors. >
