by Vernor Vinge
And that enemy was already forming up. Five Knights Guardian stood on the library’s east terrace, and a Librarian lurked by the Snake Path.
“That’s all they have?”
“So far,” said Sheila the shima-ping. “I’m just hoping we aren’t too fragmented.”
“Yeah.” That was the virtue and the weakness of the Scoochi worldview. Scooch-a-mout was distributed in bits and pieces. It was customized to the wishes of children, not just in the Great Powers, but also in the failed states at the edge of the world. The Scoochis had so many different creations. The Hacekeans had the notion of knowledge conquering outward, a vision that claimed consistency over everything. And just now that fit their near-total control of the library.
The shima-ping bounced up and down on its three feet. Sheila was shouting at the enemy with what must have been an external speaker, since Huynh could feel the loudness all over. “Get out of our way!”
“We want our floor space!”
“We want our Library!”
“And most of all, we want our REAL books!” That last demand made for a good chant, even if it didn’t quite fit with Scoochi’s edge-of-the-world background.
Sheila’s gang raced forward with the battle cries. But now dozens of Hacekeans joined the five Knights Guardian. Surely most were virtual, but the blending was perfection. No surprise; both sides knew this was coming. This was a collision of belief circles. The point was to convince the wider world by belief and images that Scooch-a-mout’s was the greater vision.
Both sides thought they knew what was coming. In fact, Tim’s had something special planned:
The Hacekeans roared their threats at the Scoochi army, at the chirps and queeps, and the larger, vaguely seen things that lumbered along behind them. They thought it was all clever imagery and human players. Then the first of the gray-masted blue ionipods crunched onto asphalt, and the Hacek people realized that the sound it made was real. At the same time one of the salsipueds—a sample carrier—raced out and bit a Knight on the ankle. It was just a small electric shock really, but the Hacekeans recoiled, wailing, “Cheaters! Cheaters!”
And it was cheating, really, but Huynh saw from the network stats that support for his side had doubled. Besides, we’re doing it for a good cause. Timothy Huynh never used the physical library that much, but what had happened there rankled.
The terrace was clear for the moment, but Sheila hesitated.
Hanson --> Night Crew:
“Yes! See!” Smale shouted aloud, and pointed them to views from above the library’s entrance. Those cams showed spiderlike somethings guarding the final approach to the library doors. The creatures were so thick they almost hid the stone mosaic. Then the views went offline.
“Jeez, were those critters real?”
“…I think some of them were,” said Sheila.
“Can’t be. Even Electrical Engineering doesn’t have that many robots. In this contest, we are the ones with mechanical superiority!”
But what if the enemy had bought a mob of hobby bots? If even half of those mechs were real—
Sheila paused, listening to advice that might be coming from anywhere on earth. Then she roared, “Into the trees!”
They gave a ragged shout. What came out of the synthetics was an answering roar, loud and baroque and totally Scoochi. They pounded off into the bushes southeast of the library. Virtual imagery faded into an artful blur that disguised the patchy network coverage.
The smaller mechs, the cleaners and sample carriers and tweezer bots, had little trouble with the mulchy ground cover. It was the forklifts that were the problem. They sank into the softness. Huynh ran around them, giving a push here and moving a stone there. The monsters slowly shuffled forward. It was not so different from some of the work he had to do down in the lab. But now was the time for some out-of-band complaining:
Huynh --> Hanson:
Hanson --> Huynh:
A little yip of surprise came from Sheila’s lips, and her sentence hung uncompleted. The virtual Scoochis blundered on for a pace or two, depending on their various latencies, but the GenGen night crew stumbled to an abrupt stop. Everybody milled around for a moment, images coalescing as they threaded routes out of the thicket.
But that was not the reason for the sudden stop. They were all staring at—a man and a rabbit. The first real, the second virtual. The two weren’t exactly hiding; they were standing in a clearing. But there was brush all around, and until the Scoochis came stumbling in, there had been no camera viewpoint on this spot.
The rabbit was nothing special, a toonish chimera. It had a nicely impudent leer, you had to give it that.
Sheila the shima-ping hesitated a second, then took a couple of threatening steps toward the rabbit. “You’re out of place.”
The critter took a chomp out of its carrot and waggled an ear. “What’s it to ya, Doc?”
“I’m not a doctor—yet,” said the shima-ping.
The rabbit laughed. “In your dreams, then. I’m here to remind you that it’s not just you and Hacek in collision tonight. There are other, greater powers at work.” It wailed the last words and swept a carrot-clutching white-furred paw at the sky.
Huynh --> Night Crew:
Smale --> Night Crew:
But Sheila ignored the objections. She sidled around the impudent rabbit and stepped close to the physically present human. That guy…looked aggressively normal: in his fifties, maybe Hispanic, dressed in dark work clothes. He was the perfect picture of UCSD faculty, though a bit over-dressed. He was wearing, but very low-key, not even showing courtesy info. His eyes followed the shima-ping with a sure calmness that—now that Huynh noticed—was a little unnerving.
Then Huynh saw what Sheila was seeing. The stranger was projecting imagery. It was a subtle thing, the sort of far-lavender shades that you almost can’t see. They were a mist that drifted up from the stranger’s shoes and seemed even brighter as they flowed into the trees.
Hanson --> Night Crew:
GenGen’s utility diagnostics were tricky to use outside of a lab, but they were much more sophisticated than what came with Epiphany outfits. In the utility view…you could see that this guy was heavily equipped. The lavender hinted at that, but now Huynh could see the scintillation of the high-rate laser links coming from the guy’s clothes.
Without the lavender clue, they might never have noticed. Sometimes the highest form of showmanship is to pretend at unsuccessfully pretending to be innocuous.
Smale --> Night Crew:
They stared at each other with joyous surmise. This must be a genuine Bollywood mogul. Belief circles were the fuel that sustained the movie industry.
Hanson --> Night Crew:
Booting Hacekean ass out of the library was more important than ever. “Onward!” shouted Hanson, now out loud and across all the world. “Down with Hacek! Down with the Librareome Menace!”
The virtuals and almost all the night crew continued on through the forest. Huynh stayed behind a few seconds, making sure that no queep or chirp was stuck in the leaves, making sure that the forklifts had enough space between the trees. And then they were all pounding along again.
“We want our floor space!”
“We want our library!”
“And most of all, we want our REAL books!”
Huynh did not expect that the spider bots would be caught by surprise. What did Sheila have up her shima-ping sleeve?
21
WHEN BELIEF CIRCLES COLLIDE
Alfred Vaz watched the depa
rting crazies.
Beside him, Rabbit swayed in time to their battle cries. For once, the critter seemed impressed by someone other than itself. Or maybe not. “Heh,” it said, giving a little carroty salute. “I can’t wait to see their faces when they discover who’s fighting for the other side.”
Vaz looked down at the furry ears. “Turn off your public presence.” The goal was to not attract attention.
“You worry too much.” But the rabbit took a last chomp and tossed the carrot green aside. This one vanished before it hit the ground. “Okay, Doc. I’m for your eyes only. What next?”
Vaz grunted and started off toward the south. In fact, he was more irritated than worried by Rabbit’s impudence. If things went properly tonight, the Americans would not connect the operation with Rabbit, much less with the Indo-European Alliance. If the Americans started seriously looking, they would quickly pick out Alfred’s role here—whether or not he and Rabbit were actually seen together. Keiko’s people had worked out an elaborate decision program—a “contingency tree”—that described just what could still be denied and what could still be achieved in the face of various glitches. Twenty years ago, Alfred would have laughed at such automated planning, but no more. His secret analyst teams had developed his own contingency tree. It grew out from Keiko’s, reaching all the way to ultimate worst cases—such as the unmasking of his YGBM project.
Alfred emerged from the densest part of the eucalyptus grove. All around him, his tiny bots unobtrusively kept pace. Every one was in violation of local law, containing not a single chip in thrall to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While Vaz continued to play Bollywood exec through the public net, these devices provided him with his own network and countermeasures. There were places in the contingency tree where they could be very useful.
Meantime, a tiny stealthed aerobot followed along above, accepting his local network’s traffic and flickering it at a thousand points in the westward sky. The energy in any pulse would be undetectable except to someone very alert and very close by, but the ensemble—correlated with the right time synch—should be visible to Keiko’s antenna array out over the Pacific. It was their very own military net. That was the theory. In fact, Alfred had been out of touch for nearly three minutes. He knew Alice Gong was on watch tonight, probably as an analyst. He had launched his attack on her just before he lost milnet access. Very soon her surveillance duties would bring her to a lab file containing an innocuous moiré pattern—only the pattern would not be innocuous for her. Has that happened yet? Maybe he should snoop it out via the public net.
“Come on, Doc, come ona come on.” Rabbit danced a little jig. Its voice had a mocking lilt that Alfred had first heard some eighty years earlier. “Is there some kinda problem?”
“No problem,” said Vaz. “Are your agents in place?”
“Never fear. All but Rivera and Gu are at the start point. I’m guiding them around the riot even as we speak. But if you want to snoop the fiber, you better hurry up.”
The ground was firm and level. There was a surfaced path. Now their speed was limited by how fast his mechs could make their stealthy way.
There were crowds here, but almost everyone was walking toward the library. He caught a glimpse of Rivera and Gu. And, once, he saw two children on bicycles. Where did that fit with Hacekeans and Scoochis? He would have put the question to his analyst pool—if only he had his milnet link.
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER hustled Robert off the surface path, down past where administration bungalows used to be. Robert kept a virtual light on the rough ground. The view was up-to-the-second and clearer than a flashlight might have given him, but keeping up with the Stranger didn’t leave time to ghost around the library. “Those are real lights back there,” he said. “Even more than before. What—?”
“The Hacek people got a little too enthusiastic. They’ve destroyed some camera infrastructure. They need real light.” He was chuckling. “Don’t worry. No one will be hurt, and it’s a diversion that will be…useful.”
The Stranger slowed. Robert looked away from the ground for a moment. Over the hill, he got a look—from a point high in the trees—at the people on the ground. In true view, they were students shouting at each other, a few involved in real scuffles. But shift a little away from strict reality, and the imagery became what one group or another wanted you to see. There were Hacek Knights and Librarians tussling with fluffy, colorful critters that might have been big-eyed mammals or—“Ah! So it’s the Scooch-a-mout fans going after the Hacekeans?”
“Mostly.” The Stranger seemed to be listening for something. Somebody was coming down the hill on an intercept course. A Librarian Militant. Carlos Rivera. The chubby librarian nodded at Stranger-Sharif and Robert. “What a mess.”
“But a useful mess,” said the Stranger.
“Yeah.” Carlos dropped his costume: the Librarian’s hat reverted to an everyday baseball cap worn backwards, and now his plate armor was just Bermuda shorts and the Rivera standard T-shirt. “I just hope this fighting doesn’t become a tradition.”
The Mysterious Stranger waved them on through the brush. “A tradition?” he said. “But that would be a plus. Like panty raids and putting automobiles on top of administration buildings. The sort of thing that made American universities great.”
Rivera puffed along. “Maybe. We’ve had a lot more business since the library went virtual, but—”
Robert was still watching the mobs beyond the hill. “I thought the whole point of belief circles was that they can coexist in the same space.”
“In principle,” said Rivera. They took a big detour around a space that was dark even in the virtual. Sharif’s image seemed to flicker and jerk. So few people walked through this area that the random network was sparse and your wearable had to make way too many guesses.
“But,” Rivera continued, “the library is a tight fit. In principle we can morph to support the multiple beliefs, like on Pyramid Hill. In fact, our environment is often too close for conflicting haptics. So the administration tried to satisfy the Scoochis by giving them some space underground.” Rivera paused, and Robert almost ran him over. “You knew that wouldn’t work, didn’t you?” Carlos was looking at Stranger-Sharif, or what Robert saw as Stranger-Sharif.
The Stranger turned and smiled. “I gave you the best advice I had, dear boy.”
“Yeah.” Rivera sounded close to surly. He looked over his shoulder at Robert. “What does he have on you, Professor?”
“I—”
“Ah, ah, ah!” interrupted the Stranger. “I think we’d all be more comfortable without such revelations.”
“Okay,” said both victims.
“In any case,” said the Stranger, “I’m rather proud of how I’ve morphed the Librareome controversy into this conflict between belief circles. This riot will distract people who would otherwise be paying attention to other things—such as what we’re doing.”
They were well south of the library now, out of the trees and coming down a steep slope. Just ahead was Gilman Drive. Carlos walked heedlessly into the street. The cars slowed or speeded up or changed lanes so there was always a wide bubble of empty space around him. Robert hesitated, looking for a crosswalk. Damn. Finally he scooted after Carlos, out into traffic.
MIRI STOPPED ON the north side of Gilman Drive.
“So where are they going?” said Juan.
“They’re coming down to Gilman Drive.” Viewpoints in the eucalyptus showed Robert and the librarian, Carlos Rivera, walking through deep brush. The pictures were fragmentary, since there weren’t many cameras there, but Miri was sure no one was pulling a swap on her. The two would reach the roadway in a couple of minutes.
“But that’s true of anyone coming south.”
Miri stopped her bike, put a foot on the ground, “Look! You want me to say I don’t know where they’re going, is that it?”
The Orozco kid stopped his wikiBay bike beside her. “Honest, I’m just wondering.”
Xiu Xiang popped into existence, and a moment later, so did a young version of Lena Gu. Their images were Barbie-doll stiff, but every day they got better. For instance, Lena had mastered facial expressions—and right now her look was stern. “Juan isn’t the only one with this question, young lady. If you don’t know, you should say so.”
Xiu just sounded anxious. “Lena and I are driving around the north side of campus. Maybe my research was all wrong. How can we help if the action is on the south?”
Miri struggled to make her own voice serene. “I think you got it right, Dr. Xiang. Juan and I have been following Robert closely, but now…I guess I don’t know where he’s going. That makes it even more important that we stay spread out. Please Dr. Xiang, if you and Lena can stay on the north side, that would be best.” Over the last few days, Xiu had done some good detective work; she could be really smart when she wasn’t doubting herself. They knew that Huertas kept the Librareome shredda in his labs on the north side. If Robert’s friends planned a “direct protest,” that would be the sensible place for them to break in. So why aren’t Robert and the others heading that way? Big boogers of uncertainty were beginning to form.
But Dr. Xiang nodded, and not even Juan Orozco asked the obvious embarrassing questions. This was still the Miri Gang. For better or worse.
The treetop cams had lost sight of Robert and Mr. Rivera. Miri dropped those viewpoints and glanced up the hillside, almost with a naked-eye perspective. The other two were still out of sight. They could come out on Gilman Drive almost anywhere.
Miri licked her lips. “The main thing is to keep these—”