by Vernor Vinge
Erythrina nodded to Robin Hood, then proceeded down the hall to DON.MAC, who had originally shouted greetings and now continued, “We’ve just been trying to convince Slimey and Slip that they are wasting their time on pranks when they could have real power and real wealth.”
She glanced sharply at Wiley, who seemed strangely irritated that she had been drawn into the conversation. “‘We’ meaning you and Wiley and the Mailman?”
Wiley nodded. “I just started working with them last week, Ery,” as if to say, and you can’t stop me.
“You may have something, DON. We all started out as amateurs, doing our best to make the System just a little bit uncomfortable for its bureaucratic masters. But we are experts now. We probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power.” It was the same thing the other two had been saying, but she could make it much more persuasive. Before his encounter with the Feds, he might have bought it (even though he always knew that the day he got serious about Coven activities and went after real gain would also be the day it ceased to be an enjoyable game and became an all-consuming job that would suck time away from the projects that made life entertaining).
Erythrina looked from Mr. Slippery to the Limey and then back. The Limey was an easygoing sort, but just now he was a bit miffed at the way his own pet project had been dismissed. “Not for me, thanky,” he said shortly and began to gather up his maps.
She turned her green, faintly oriental eyes upon Mr. Slippery. “How about you, Slip? Have you signed up with the Mailman?”
He hesitated. Maybe I should. It seemed clear that the Mailman’s confederates were being let in on at least part of his schemes. In a few hours, he might be able to learn enough to get Virginia off his back. And perhaps destroy his friends to boot; it was a hell of a bargain. God in Heaven, why did they have to get mixed up in this? Don’t they realize what the Government will do to them, if they really try to take over, if they ever try to play at being more than vandals? “Not…not yet,” he said finally. “I’m awfully tempted, though.”
She grinned, regular white teeth flashing against her dark, faintly green face. “I, too. What do you say we talk it over, just the two of us?” She reached out a slim, dark hand to grasp his elbow. “Excuse us, gentlemen; hopefully, when we get back, you’ll have a couple of new allies.” And Mr. Slippery felt himself gently propelled toward the dark and musty stairs that led to Erythrina’s private haunts.
Her torch burned and glowed, but there was no smoke. The flickering yellow lit their path for scant meters ahead. The stairs were steep and gently curving. He had the feeling that they must do a complete circle every few hundred steps: this was an immense spiral cut deep into the heart of the living rock. And it was alive. As the smell of mildew and rot increased, as the dripping from the ceiling grew subtly louder and the puddles in the worn steps deeper, the walls high above their heads took on shapes, and those shapes changed and flowed to follow them. Erythrina protected her part of the castle as thoroughly as the castle itself was guarded against the outside world. Mr. Slippery had no doubt that if she wished, she could trap him permanently here, along with the lizards and the rock sprites. (Of course he could always “escape” simply by falling back into the real world, but until she relented or he saw through her spells, he would not be able to access any other portion of the castle.) Working on some of their projects, he had visited her underground halls, but never anything this deep.
He watched her shapely form preceding him down, down, down. Of all the Coven (with the possible exception of Robin Hood, and of course the Mailman), she was the most powerful. He suspected that she was one of the original founders. If only there were some way of convincing her (without revealing the source of his knowledge) that the Mailman was a threat. If only there was some way of getting her cooperation in nailing down the Mailman’s True Name.
Erythrina stopped short and he bumped pleasantly into her. Over her shoulder, a high door ended the passage. She moved her hand in a pattern hidden from Mr. Slippery and muttered some unlocking spell. The door split horizontally, its halves pulling apart with oiled and massive precision. Beyond, he had the impression of spots and lines of red breaking a further darkness.
“Mind your step,” she said and hopped over a murky puddle that stood before the high sill of the doorway.
As the door slid shut behind them, Erythrina changed the torch to a single searing spot of white light, like some old-time incandescent bulb. The room was bright-lit now. Comfortable black leather chairs sat on black tile. Red engraving, faintly glowing, was worked into the tile and the obsidian of the walls. In contrast to the stairway, the air was fresh and clean—though still.
She waved him to a chair that faced away from the light, then sat on the edge of a broad desk. The point light glinted off her eyes, making them unreadable. Erythrina’s face was slim and fine-boned, almost Asian except for the pointed ears. But the skin was dark, and her long hair had the reddish tones unique to some North American blacks. She was barely smiling now, and Mr. Slippery wished again he had some way of getting her help.
“Slip, I’m scared,” she said finally, the smile gone.
You’re scared! For a moment, he couldn’t quite believe his ears. “The Mailman?” he asked, hoping.
She nodded. “This is the first time in my life I’ve felt outgunned. I need help. Robin Hood may be the most competent, but he’s basically a narcissist; I don’t think I could interest him in anything beyond his immediate gratifications. That leaves you and the Limey. And I think there’s something special about you. We’ve done a couple things together,” she couldn’t help herself, and grinned remembering. “They weren’t real impressive, but somehow I have a feeling about you: I think you understand what things up here are silly games and what things are really important. If you think something is really important, you can be trusted to stick with it even if the going gets a little…bloody.”
Coming from someone like Ery, the words had special meaning. It was strange, to feel both flattered and frightened. Mr. Slippery stuttered for a moment, inarticulate. “What about Wiley J? Seems to me you have special…influence over him.”
“You knew…?”
“Suspected.”
“Yes, he’s my thrall. Has been for almost six months. Poor Wiley turns out to be a life-insurance salesman from Peoria. Like a lot of warlocks, he’s rather a Thurberesque fellow in real life: timid, always dreaming of heroic adventures and grandiose thefts. Only nowadays people like that can realize their dreams…Anyway, he doesn’t have the background, or the time, or the skill that I do, and I found his True Name. I enjoy the chase more than the extortion, so I haven’t leaned on him too hard; now I wish I had. Since he’s taken up with the Mailman, he’s been giving me the finger. Somehow Wiley thinks that what they have planned will keep him safe even if I give his True Name to the cops!”
“So the Mailman actually has some scheme for winning political power in the real world?”
She smiled. “That’s what Wiley thinks. You see, poor Wiley doesn’t know that there are more uses for True Names than simple blackmail. I know everything he sends over the data links, everything he has been told by the Mailman.”
“So what are they up to?” It was hard to conceal his eagerness. Perhaps this will be enough to satisfy Virginia and her goons.
Erythrina seemed frozen for a moment, and he realized that she too must be using the low-altitude satellite net for preliminary processing: her task had just been handed off from one comsat to a nearer bird. Ordinarily it was easy to disguise the hesitation. She must be truly upset.
And when she finally replied, it wasn’t really with an answer. “You know what convinced Wiley that the Mailman could deliver on his promises? It was DON. MAC—and the revolution in Venezuela. Apparently DON and the Mailman had been working on that for several months before Wiley joined them. It was to be the Mailman’s first demonstration that controlling data and information services could
be used to take permanent political control of a state. And Venezuela, they claimed, was perfect: it has enormous data-processing facilities—all just a bit obsolete, since they were bought when the country was at the peak of its boom time.”
“But that was clearly an internal coup. The present leaders are local—”
“Nevertheless, DON is supposedly down there now, the real Jefe, for the first time in his life able to live in the physical world the way we do in this plane. If you have your own country, you are no longer small fry that must guard his True Name. You don’t have to settle for crumbs.”
“You said ‘supposedly’.”
“Slip, have you noticed anything strange about DON lately?”
Mr. Slippery thought back. DON.MAC had always been the most extreme of the werebots—after the Mailman. He was not an especially talented fellow, but he did go to great lengths to sustain the image that he was both machine and human. His persona was always present in this plane, though at least part of the time it was a simulator—like Alan out in the magma moat. The simulation was fairly good, but no one had yet produced a program that could really pass the Turing test: that is, fool a real human for any extended time. Mr. Slippery remembered the silly smile that seemed pasted on DON’s face and the faintly repetitive tone of his lobbying for the Mailman. “You think the real person behind DON is gone, that we have a zombie up there?”
“Slip, I think the real DON is dead, and I mean the True Death.”
“Maybe he just found the real world more delightful than this, now that he owns such a big hunk of it?”
“I don’t think he owns anything. It’s just barely possible that the Mailman had something to do with that coup; there are a number of coincidences between what they told Wiley beforehand and what actually happened. But I’ve spent a lot of time floating through the Venezuelan data bases, and I think I’d know if an outsider were on the scene, directing the new order.
“I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names—and then destroying us. So far he has only done it to one of us. I’ve been watching DON.MAC both directly and automatically since the coup, and there has never been a real person behind that facade, not once in two thousand hours. Wiley is next. The poor slob hasn’t even been told yet what country his kingdom is to be—evidence that the Mailman doesn’t really have the power he claims—but even so, he’s ready to do practically anything for the Mailman, and against us.
“Slip, we have got to identify this thing, this Mailman, before he can get us.”
She was even more upset than Virginia and the Feds. And she was right. For the first time, he felt more afraid of the Mailman than the government agents. He held up his hands. “I’m convinced. But what should we do? You’ve got the best angle in Wiley. The Mailman doesn’t know you’ve got a tap through him, does he?”
She shook her head. “Wiley is too chicken to tell him, and doesn’t realize that I can do this with his True Name. But I’m already doing everything I can with that. I want to pool information, guesses, with you. Between us maybe we can see something new.”
“Well for starters, it’s obvious that the Mailman’s queer communication style—those long time delays—is a ploy. I know that fellow is listening all the time to what’s going on in the Coven meeting hall. And he commands a number of sprites in real time.” Mr. Slippery remembered the day the Mailman—or at least his teleprinter—had arrived. The image of an American Van Lines truck had pulled up at the edge of the moat, nearly intimidating Alan. The driver and loader were simulators, though good ones. They had answered all of Alan’s questions correctly, then hauled the shipping crate down to the meeting hall. They hadn’t left till the warlocks signed for the shipment and promised to “wire a wall outlet” for the device. This enemy definitely knew how to arouse the curiosity of his victims. Whoever controlled that printer seemed perfectly capable of normal behavior. Perhaps it’s someone we already know, like in the mysteries where the murderer masquerades as one of the victims. Robin Hood?
“I know. In fact, he can do many things faster than I. He must control some powerful processors. But you’re partly wrong: the living part of him that’s behind it all really does operate with at least a one-hour turnaround time. All the quick stuff is programmed.”
Mr. Slippery started to protest, then realized that she could be right. “My God, what could that mean? Why would he deliberately saddle himself with that disadvantage?”
Erythrina smiled with some satisfaction. “I’m convinced that if we knew that, we’d have this guy sighted. I agree it’s too great a disadvantage to be a simple red herring. I think he must have some time-delay problem to begin with, and—”
“—and he has exaggerated it?” But even if the Mailman were an Australian, the low satellite net made delays so short that he would probably be indistinguishable from a European or a Japanese. There was no place on Earth where…but there are places off Earth! The mass-transmit satellites were in synchronous orbit 120 milliseconds out. There were about two hundred people there. And further out, at L5, there were at least another four hundred. Some were near-permanent residents. A strange idea, but still a possibility.
“I don’t think he has exaggerated. Slip, I think the Mailman—not his processors and simulators, you understand—is at least a half-hour out from Earth, probably in the asteroid belt.”
She smiled suddenly, and Mr. Slippery realized that his jaw must be resting on his chest. Except for the Joint Mars Recon, no human had been anywhere near that far out. No human. Mr. Slippery felt his ordinary, everyday world disintegrating into sheer science fiction. This was ridiculous.
“I know you don’t believe; it took me a while to. He’s not so obvious that he doesn’t add in some time delay to disguise the cyclic variation in our relative positions. But it is a consistent explanation for the delay. These last few weeks I’ve been sniffing around the classified reports on our asteroid probes; there are definitely some mysterious things out there.”
“Okay. It’s consistent. But you’re talking about an interstellar invasion. Even if NASA had the funding, it would take them decades to put the smallest interstellar probe together—and decades more for the flight. Trying to invade anyone with those logistics would be impossible. And if these aliens have a decent stardrive, why do they bother with deception? They could just move in and brush us aside.”
“Ah, that’s the point, Slip. The invasion I’m thinking of doesn’t need any “stardrive,” and it works fine against any race at exactly our point of development. Right: most likely interstellar war is a fantastically expensive business, with decade lead times. What better policy for an imperialistic, highly technological race than to lie doggo listening for evidence of younger civilizations? When they detect such, they send only one ship. When it arrives in the victims’ solar system, the Computer Age is in full bloom there. We in the Coven know how fragile the present system is; it is only fear of exposure that prevents some warlocks from trying to take over. Just think how appealing our naïveté must be to an older civilization that has thousands of years of experience at managing data systems. Their small crew of agents moves in as close as local military surveillance permits and gradually insinuates itself into the victims’ system. They eliminate what sharp individuals they detect in that system—people like us—and then they go after the bureaucracies and the military. In ten or twenty years, another fiefdom is ready for the arrival of the master race.”
She lapsed into silence, and for a long moment they stared at each other. It did all hang together with a weird sort of logic. “What can we do, then?”
“That’s the question.” She shook her head sadly, came across the room to sit beside him. Now that she had said her piece, the fire had gone out of her. For the first time since he had known her, Erythrina looked depressed. “We could just forsake this plane and stay in the real world. The Mailman might still be able to track us down, but we’d be o
f no more interest to him than anyone else. If we were lucky, we might have years before he takes over.” She straightened. “I’ll tell you this: if we want to live as warlocks, we have to stop him soon—within days at most. After he gets Wiley, he may drop the con tactics for something more direct.
“If I’m right about the Mailman, then our best bet would be to discover his communication link. That would be his Achilles’ heel; there’s no way you can hide in the crowd when you’re beaming from that far away. We’ve got to take some real chances now, do things we’d never risk before. I figure that if we work together, maybe we can lessen the risk that either of us is identified.”
He nodded. Ordinarily a prudent warlock used only limited bandwidth and so was confined to a kind of linear, personal perception. If they grabbed a few hundred megahertz of comm space, and a bigger share of rented processors, they could manipulate and search files in a way that would boggle Virginia the femcop. Of course, they would be much more easily identifiable. With two of them, though, they might be able to keep it up safely for a brief time, confusing the government and the Mailman with a multiplicity of clues. “Frankly, I don’t buy the alien part. But the rest of what you say makes sense, and that’s what counts. Like you say, we’re going to have to take some chances.”
“Right!” She smiled and reached behind his neck to draw his face to hers. She was a very good kisser. (Not everyone was. It was one thing just to look gorgeous, and another to project and respond to the many sensory cues in something as interactive as kissing.) He was just warming to this exercise of their mutual abilities when she broke off. “And the best time to start is right now. The others think we’re sealed away down here. If strange things happen during the next few hours, it’s less likely the Mailman will suspect us.” She reached up to catch the light point in her hand. For an instant, blades of harsh white slipped out from between her fingers; then all was dark. He felt faint air motion as her hands moved through another spell. There were words, distorted and unidentifiable. Then the light was back, but as a torch again, and a door—a second door—had opened in the far wall.