The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  Her parents had left for San Francisco after a one-day stay. The summer conference at USF was starting that week, and they weren’t yet sure they had an apartment. Sanda’s first night alone with Grandma had been everything she imagined. Even though the evening beyond the porch was turning chill, the living room still held its warmth. Grandma set her old electric heater in the middle of the carpeted floor so that it shone on the sofa side of the room. Then she walked around the book-lined walls pretending to search for the thing she so liked to show her grandchild.

  “Not here, not here. Oh my, I hardly ever look at it nowadays. I forget where…” Sanda tagged along, noticing titles where her earlier, younger self had been impressed only by color and size. Grandma had a complete collection of National Geographics. Where most families put such magazines in boxes and forget them, Grandmother had every issue there, as though they were some grand encyclopedia. And for Sanda, they were. On her last visit she had spent many an afternoon looking through the pictures. It was the only item she remembered for sure from this library. Now she saw dozens of books on polar exploration, meteorology, biology. Grandfather Beauchamp had been a great man, and Grandmother kept the library and its books, plaques, and certificates in honor of his memory.

  “Ah, here it is!” She pulled the huge notebook down from its central position. She led Sanda back to the sofa. “Too big to sit in my lap, now, aren’t you?” They grinned at each other and she opened the book across their laps, then put her arm across Sanda’s shoulders.

  The book was precisely organized. Every newspaper clipping, photo, article, was framed and had a short legend. Some of the pictures existed nowhere else in the world. Others could be found in articles in magazines like the National Geographic from the ’20s and ’30s. Rex Beauchamp had been on the “Terra Nova” expedition in 1910. If it hadn’t been for a knee injury he would actually have been on Scott’s tragic journey to the South Pole. Sanda sucked in her breath and asked the same question she had asked once before, “And so if his knee had been okay, why, he would have died with the others—and would never have met you, and you would never have had Dad, and—”

  GRANDMA SLAPPED THE NOTEBOOK. “No. I know Rex. He would have made the difference. If they had just waited for him to get well, they could have made it back to the coast.”

  IT WAS AN ANSWER she had heard before, but one she wanted to hear again. Sanda sat back and waited for the rest of the story. After World War I, the Beauchamps had emigrated from Great Britain, and Grandfather participated in several American expeditions. There were dozens of pictures of him on shipboard and in the brave little camps the explorers had established along the Antarctic coast. Rex Beauchamp had been very handsome and boyish even in middle age, and it made Sanda proud to see him in those pictures—though he was rarely the center of attention. He always seemed to be in the background, or in the third row of the group portraits. Grandma said he was a doer and not a talker. He never had a college degree and so had to serve in technician and support jobs. But they depended on him nevertheless.

  NOT ALL THE PICTURES were of ice and snow. Many of the expeditions had worked out of Christchurch, New Zealand. On one occasion, Grandmother had gone along that far. It had been a wonderful vacation for her. She had pictures of the city and its wide, circular harbor, and others of her visiting the North Island and Maori country with Grandfather.

  Sanda raised her eyes from the picture collection as her grandmother spoke. There were things in this room that illustrated her story more spectacularly than any photographs. The area around the sofa was brightly lit by one of the beautiful stained-glass lamps that Grandma had in every room. But at the limits of its light, the room glowed in mysterious blue and red and yellow from the higher panes in the glass. Dark polished wood edged the carpet and the moldings of every doorway. Beyond the electric heater she could see the Maori statues the Beauchamps had brought back from their stay at Rotorua. In normal light those figures carved in wooden relief seemed faintly comical, their pointed tongues stuck out like weapons, their hands held claw-like. But in the colored dimness the mother-of-pearl in their eyes shone almost knowingly, and the extended tongues were no childish aggression. Sanda wriggled with a moment of delicious fright. The Maori were all civilized now, Grandmother said, but they had been more hideously ferocious than any savages on Earth.

  “Do you still have the meri, Grandma?”

  “Yes indeed.” She reached into the embroidered sewing stand that sat next to her end of the sofa and withdrew a graceful, eight-inch piece of stone. One end fit the hand, while the other spread out in a smooth, blunt-edged oval. It was beautiful, and no one but someone like Grandma—or a Maori—could know its true purpose. “This is what they fought with, not like American Indians with spears and arrows.” She handed it to Sanda, who ran her fingers over the smoothness. “It’s so short you have to come right up to your enemy and whack! right across the forehead.” Sanda tried to imagine but couldn’t. Grandma had so many beautiful things. Sanda had once overheard her mother complain to Daddy that these were thefts from an ancient heritage. Sanda couldn’t see why; she was sure that Grandpa had paid for these things. And if he hadn’t brought them back to Eureka, so many fewer people could have admired them.

  Grandma talked on, well past Sanda’s La Jolla bedtime. The girl found herself half hypnotized by the multicolored shadows of the lamp and the pale red from the heater. That heater sat on newspapers.

  Sanda felt herself come wide awake. “That heater, Grandma. Isn’t it dangerous?”

  The woman stopped in mid-reminiscence. “What? No, I’ve had it for years. And I’m careful not to set it on the carpet where it might stain.”

  “But those newspapers. They’re brown, almost burned.”

  Grandma looked at the heater. “My, you’re a big girl now, to worry about such things. I don’t know…Anyway, we can turn it off now. You should be going to bed, don’t you think?”

  Sanda was to sleep in the same room her father had used when he was little. It was on the second floor. As they walked down the hall to the bedroom, Grandma stopped by the heavy terrarium she kept there. Dad and Mother hadn’t known quite what to make of it: the glass box was something new. Grandma had placed it so the wide skylight gave it sun through most of the day. Now moonlight washed over the glass and the stones. Pale reflections came off some of the smaller rocks. Grandma switched on the hall light and turned everything mundane. The terrarium was empty of life. There was nothing there but rocks of odd sizes mixed with river-washed gravel. It was like the box Sanda kept her pet lizards in. But there were not even lizards in this one. The only concessions to life were little plastic flowers, “planted” here and there in the landscape.

  Grandma smiled wanly. “I think your Dad believes I’m crazy to put something like this here.”

  Sanda looked at the strange display for a moment and then suggested, “Maybe if you used real flowers?”

  The old woman shook her head. “I like artificial ones. You don’t have to water them. They never fade or die. They are always beautiful.” She paused and Sanda remained diplomatically silent. “Anyway, it’s the rocks that are the important thing here. I showed you pictures of those valleys your grandfather helped discover: the ones that don’t have any snow in them, even though they’re hundreds of miles inside Antarctica. These rocks are from one of those valleys. They must have been sitting there for thousands of years with nothing but the wind to upset them. Rex kept his collection in boxes down in the basement, but I think they are so much nicer up here. This is a little like what they had before.”

  Sanda looked into the cabinet with new interest. Some of the stones were strange. A couple looked like the meteorites she had seen in the Natural History Museum back home. And there was another, about the size of her head, that had a vaguely regular pattern in the gray and black minerals that were its substance.

  Minutes later, Sanda was tucked into her father’s old bed, the lights were out, and Grandmother was desc
ending the stairs. Moonlight spread silver on the window sills, and the pines beyond were soft, pale, bright. Sanda sighed and smiled. So far, things were just as she dreamed and just as she remembered.

  The last she wondered as she drifted off to sleep was why Grandmother put flowers in the terrarium if she really wanted to imitate the bleak antarctic valleys.

  THAT FIRST DAY WAS really the last when everything went totally well. And looking back on it, Sanda could see symptoms of many of the things that were later to make the summer so unpleasant.

  Physically everything was just as she remembered. The stair railings were a rich, deeply polished wood that she hardly ever saw in La Jolla. Everywhere was carpeting, even on the stairs. The basement was cool and damp and filled with all the mysterious things that Grandfather had worked with. But there were so many things that Grandma did and believed that were wrong. Some—like the flowers—were differences of opinion that Sanda could keep her mouth shut about. Others—like Grandma’s use of the old electric heater—were really dangerous. When she spoke about those, Grandmother didn’t seem to believe or understand her. The older woman would smile and tell her what a big girl she was getting to be, but it was clear she was a little hurt by the suggestions, no matter how diplomatically put. Finally Sanda had taken a plastic mat off the back porch and slipped it under the heater in place of the newspapers. But Grandma noticed, and furthermore pointed out that the dirty mat had stained the beautiful carpet—just the thing the nice clean newspapers had been there to prevent. Sanda had been crushed: she’d been harmful when she wanted to be helpful. Grandmother was very good about it; in the end—after she cleaned the carpet—she suggested putting the mat between the newspapers and the heater. So the incident ended happily, after all.

  But this sort of thing seemed to happen all the time: Sanda trying to do something different, some hurt being caused to property or Grandma, and then sincere apology and reconciliation. Sanda began to feel a little haggard, and to watch the calendar for a different reason than before. Just being with Grandma had been one of the big attractions of this summer. Both she and Grandma were trying, but it wasn’t working. Sometimes Sanda thought that—no matter how often Grandma said Sanda was a young grown-up now—she still thought Sanda was five years old. She had seriously wanted Sanda to take afternoon naps. Only when the girl assured her that her parents no longer required naps did she relent. And Grandma never told her to do anything. She always asked Sanda “wouldn’t you like to” do whatever she wanted. It was awfully hard to smile and say “oh yes, that would be fun” when in fact it was a chore she would rather pass up. At home it was so much easier: Sanda did as she was told, and did not have to claim to love it.

  A week later the fair weather broke. It rained. And rained. And rained. And when it wasn’t raining it was cloudy; not cloudy as in La Jolla, but a dripping, misty cloudiness that just promised more rain. Grandma said it was often this way; Sanda had just been lucky on the previous visits.

  And it was about this time she began to be afraid of the upstairs. Grandmother slept downstairs, though she stayed up very late at night, reading or sewing. She would be easy to call if anything…bad happened. That did not help. At first it was like an ordinary fear of darkness. Some nights a person is just more fidgety than others. And after the weather turned bad it was easy to feel scared, lying in bed with the wind and the rattle of rain against the windows. But this was different. The feeling increased from night to night. It wasn’t quite a feeling that something was sneaking up on her. More it was a sense of utter desolation and despair. Sometimes it seemed as if the room, the whole house, were gone and she was in just the antarctic wilderness that Grandfather had explored. She had no direct visions of this—just the feeling of cold and lifelessness extending forever. Grandfather’s ghost?

  Late one night Sanda had to go to the bathroom, which was down on the first floor next to Grandmother’s bedroom. It was almost painful to move—so afraid was she of making a sound, of provoking whatever caused the mood that filled her room. When she passed the terrarium in the hallway, the feeling of cold grew stronger and her legs tensed for a sprint down the stairs. Instead she forced herself to stand still, then to walk slowly around the glass cage. Something in there was causing it. The terror was insidious, growing as she stood there—almost as if what caused this now knew it had a “listener.” Sanda slept at the foot of the stairs that night.

  After that, when night came and Grandmother had tucked her in, Sanda would creep out of bed, unwrap her sleeping bag, and quietly carry it onto the balcony that opened off her room. The extra distance and the extra wall reduced the psychic cold to a tolerable level. Many nights it was rainy, and it was always chill and a bit windy, but she had bought a really good sleeping bag for the Scouts, and she had always liked to camp out. Nevertheless, it wore her down to sleep like that night after night, and made it harder to be diplomatic and cheerful during the days.

  In the daytime there was far less feeling of dread upstairs. Sanda didn’t know whether this was because the second floor was basically a sunny, cheerful place or whether the ghost “slept” during the day. Whenever she walked past the terrarium she looked carefully into it. After a while, she thought she had the effect narrowed down to one particular rock—the skull-sized one with the strangely regular patterns of gray and black. As the days passed, the position of some of the rocks changed. There had been five plastic flowers in the terrarium when Sanda first saw it; now there were three.

  There was one other mystery—which under other circumstances would have been very sinister, but which seemed scarcely more than an intriguing puzzle now. Several times, usually on stormy nights, a car parked in the grass just off the other side of the street, about forty yards north of the house. That was all; Sanda had noticed it only by accident. It looked like a ’54 Ford. Once a match flared within the cab, and she saw two occupants. She smiled smugly, wistfully to herself; she could imagine what they were up to. But she was wrong. One night, when the rain had stopped yet clouds kept out the stars, the driver got out and walked across the street toward the house. He moved silently, quickly. Sanda had to lean out from the balcony to see him crouch in the bushes next to the wall where the electric power meter was mounted. He spent only half a minute there. She saw a tiny point of light moving over the power meter and the utility cables that came down from the telephone pole at the street. Then the phantom meter reader stood and ran back across the street, quietly relatching the door of his Ford. The car sat for several more minutes—as if they were watching the house for some sign of alarm—and then drove away.

  She should have told Grandma. But then, if she were being as open as a good girl should be with a grandmother, she would have also confessed her fear of the upstairs and the terrarium. Those fears were shameful, though. Even if real, they were the type of childish thing that could only make her situation with Grandma worse. Grandmother was a clever person. Sanda knew that if she told her about the mysterious car, the older woman would either dismiss the story—or question her in sufficient detail to discover that Sanda was sleeping on the balcony.

  So she dithered—and in the end told someone else.

  FINDING THAT SOMEONE ELSE had been a surprise; she hadn’t really known she was looking. Whenever the weather dried a little, Sanda tried to get outdoors. The city library was about three miles away, an easy ride on her father’s old bicycle. Of course Grandmother had been uneasy about Sanda carrying library books in the saddle baskets of the bike. There was always the risk of splashing water or a sudden rainstorm. It was just another of the polite little conflicts they had. One or the other of them could always see some objection to a given activity. In the end—as usual—they compromised, with Sanda taking grocery bags and a little waxed paper for the books.

  Today wasn’t wet, though. The big blocks of cloud left plenty of space for the blue. To the northwest, the plume from the paper mill was purest white across the sky. The sun was warm, and the gusty breeze dry. It w
as the sort of day she once thought was every day in Eureka.

  Sanda took a detour, biking back along the street away from town. The asphalt ended about thirty yards past Grandmother’s lot. There were supposed to be more houses up here, but Grandma didn’t think much of them. She passed one. It looked like a trailer used as a permanent home. A couple old cars, one looking very dead, were in front. The trees came in close to the road here, blocking out the sun. It felt a little like those great forests they’d driven through to get to Eureka. Even after a half day of sun, there was still a slow dripping from the needles. Everything was so green it might as well be dipped in paint. Once she had liked that.

  She went a lot farther south than she had before. The road stopped at a dead end. A one-storey, red-shingled house was the last thing on the street. It was a real house, but it reminded Sanda of the trailer. It was such a different thing from Grandmother’s house. There were a lot of small houses in La Jolla, but the weather back home was so dry and mild that buildings didn’t seem to wear out. Here Sanda had the feeling that the damp, the cold, and the mildew were forever warring on the houses. This place had been losing the fight for some time.

  She circled around the end of the road—and almost ran into a second bicyclist.

  Sanda stopped abruptly and awkwardly. (The center bar on the bike was a little high for her.) “Where did you come from?” she asked a bit angrily.

  The boy was taller than Sanda, and looked very strong. He must be at least fifteen years old. But his face was soft, almost stupid-looking. He waved at the red-shingled house. “We live here. Who are you?”