by Vernor Vinge
Funny. After all these years and all the dreams, that it was the Blab the Outsiders were after…
Hamid was an adopted child. His parents had told him that as soon as he could understand the notion. And somewhere in those early years, he had guessed the truth…that his father had brought him in…from the Beyond. Somehow Huss Thompson had kept that fact secret from the public. Surely the government knew, and cooperated with him. In those early years—before they forced him into Math—it had been a happy secret for him; he thought he had all his parents’ love. Knowing that he was really from Out There had merely given substance to what most well-loved kids believe anyway—that somehow they are divinely special. His secret dream had been that he was some Outsider version of an exiled prince. And when he grew up, when the next ships from the Beyond came down…he would be called to his destiny.
Starting college at age eight had just seemed part of that destiny. His parents had been so confident of him, even though his tests results were scarcely more than bright normal…That year had been the destruction of innocence. He wasn’t a genius, no matter how much his parents insisted. The fights, the tears, their insistence. In the end, Mom had left Hussein Thompson. Not till then did the man relent, let his child return to normal schools. Life at home was never the same. Mom’s visits were brief, tense…and rare. But it wasn’t for another five years that Hamid learned to hate his father. The learning had been an accident, a conversation overheard. Hussein had been hired to raise Hamid as he had, to push him into school, to twist and ruin him. The old man had never denied the boy’s accusations. His attempts to “explain” had been vague mumbling…worse than lies…If Hamid was a prince, he must be a very hated one indeed.
The memories had worn deep grooves, ones he often slid down on his way to sleep…But tonight there was something new, something ironic to the point of magic. All these years…it had been the Blab who was the lost princeling…!
THERE WAS A HISSING SOUND. Hamid struggled toward wakefulness, fear and puzzlement playing through his dreams. He rolled to the edge of the bed and forced his eyes to see. Only stars shone through the window. The Blab. She wasn’t sitting at the window screen anymore. She must be having one of her nightmares. They were rare, but spectacular. One winter’s night Hamid had been wakened by the sounds of a full-scale thunderstorm. This was not so explosive, but…
He looked across the floor at the pile of blankets that was her nest. Yes. She was there, and facing his way.
“Blab? It’s okay, baby.”
No reply. Only the hissing, maybe louder now. It wasn’t coming from the Blab. For an instant his fuzzy mind hung in a kind of mouse-and-snake paralysis. Then he flicked on the lights. No one here. The sound was from the dataset; the picture flat remained dark. This is crazy.
“Blab?” He had never seen her like this. Her eyes were open wide, rings of white showing around the irises. Her forelegs reached beyond the blankets. The talons were extended and had slashed deep into the plastic flooring. A string of drool hung from her muzzle.
He got up, started toward her. The hissing formed a voice, and the voice spoke. “I want her. Human, I want her. And I will have her.” Her, the Blab.
“How did you get access? You have no business disturbing us.” Silly talk, but it broke the nightmare spell of this waking.
“My name is Tines.” Hamid suddenly remembered the claw on the Ravna&Tines logo. Tines. Cute. “We have made generous offers. We have been patient. That is past. I will have her. If it means the death of all you m-meat animals, so be it. But I will have her.”
The hissing was almost gone now, but the voice still sounded like something from a cheap synthesizer. The syntax and accent were similar to Ravna’s. They were either the same person, or they had learned English from the same source. Still, Ravna had seemed angry. Tines sounded flat-out nuts. Except for the single stutter over “meat,” the tone and pacing were implacable. And that voice gave away more than anything yet about why the Outsider wanted his pet. There was a hunger in its voice, a lust to feed or to rape.
Hamid’s rage climbed on top of his fear. “Why don’t you just go screw yourself, comic monster! We’ve got protection, else you wouldn’t come bluffing—”
“Bluffing! Bluffiiyowru—” the words turned into choked gobbling sounds. Behind him, Hamid heard the Blab scream. After a moment the noises faded. “I do not bluff. Hussein Thompson has this hour learned what I do with those who cross me. You and all your people will also die unless you deliver her to me. I see a ground car parked by your…house. Use it to take her east fifty kilometers. Do this within one hour, or learn what Hussein Thompson learned—that I do not bluff.” And Mr. Tines was gone.
It has to be a bluff! If Tines has that power, why not wipe the Tourists from the sky and just grab the Blab? Yet they were so stupid about it. A few smooth lies a week ago, and they might have gotten everything without a murmur. It was as if they couldn’t imagine being disobeyed—or were desperate beyond reason.
Hamid turned back to the Blab. As he reached to stroke her neck, she twisted, her needle-toothed jaws clicking shut on his pyjama sleeve. “Blab!”
She released his sleeve, and drew back into the pile of blankets. She was making whistling noises like the time she got hit by a pickup trike. Hamid’s father had guessed those must be true blabber sounds, like human sobs or chattering of teeth. He went to his knees and made comforting noises. This time she let him stroke her neck. He saw that she had wet her bed. The Blab had been toilet-trained as long as he had. Bluff or not, this had thoroughly terrified her. Tines claimed he could kill everyone. Hamid remembered the ansible, a god-damned telephone that could dim the sun.
Bluff or madness?
He scrambled back to his dataset, and punched up the Tour Director’s number. Pray the slug was accepting more than mail tonight. The ring pattern flashed twice, and then he was looking at a panorama of cloud tops and blue sky. It might have been an aerial view of Middle America, except that as you looked downward the clouds seemed to extend forever, more and more convoluted in the dimness. This was a picture clip from the ten-bar level over Lothlrimarre. No doubt the slug chose it to soothe human callers, and still be true to the nature of his home world—a subjovian thirty thousand kilometers across.
For five seconds they soared through the canyons of cloud. Wake up, damn you!
The picture cleared and he was looking at a human—Larry Fujiyama! Lazy Larry did not look surprised to see him. “You got the right number, kid. I’m up here with the slug. There have been developments.”
Hamid gaped for an appropriate reply, and the other continued. “Ravna&Tines have been all over the slug since about midnight. Threats and promises, mostly threats since the Tines critter took their comm…I’m sorry about your dad, Hamid. We should’ve thought to—”
“What?”
“Isn’t that what you’re calling about?…Oh. It’s been on the news. Here—” The picture dissolved into a view from a news chopper flying over Eastern Michigan farmland. It took Hamid a second to recognize the hills. This was near the Thompson spread, two thousand klicks east of Marquette. It would be past sunup there. The camera panned over a familiar creek, the newsman bragging how On-Line News was ahead of the first rescue teams. They crested a range of hills and…where were the trees? Thousands of black lines lay below, trunks of blown-over trees, pointing inevitably inward, toward the center of the blast. The newsman babbled on about the meteor strike and how fortunate it was that ground zero was in a lake valley, how only one farm had been affected. Hamid swallowed. That farm…was Hussein Thompson’s. The place they lived after Mom left. Ground zero itself was obscured by rising steam—all that was left of the lake. The reporter assured his audience that the crater consumed all the land where the farm buildings had been.
The news clip vanished. “It was no Middle American nuke, but it wasn’t natural, either,” said Larry. “A lighter from Ravna&Tines put down there two hours ago. Just before the blast, I got a
real scared call from Huss, something about ‘the tines’ arriving. I’ll show it to you if—”
“No!” Hamid gulped. “No,” he said more quietly. How he had hated Hussein Thompson; how he had loved his father in the years before. Now he was gone, and Hamid would never get his feelings sorted out. “Tines just called me. He said he killed my—Hussein.” Hamid played back the call. “Anyway, I need to talk to the slug. Can he protect me? Is Middle America really in for it if I refuse the Tines thing?”
For once Larry didn’t give his “you figure it” shrug. “It’s a mess,” he said. “And sluggo’s waffling. He’s around here somewhere. Just a sec—” More peaceful cloud-soaring. Damn, damn, damn. Something bumped gently into the small of his back. The Blab. The black and white neck came around his side. The dark eyes looked up at him. “What’s up?” she said quietly.
Hamid felt like laughing and crying. She was very subdued, but at least she recognized him now. “Are you okay, baby?” he said. The Blabber curled up around him, her head stretched out on his knee.
On the dataset, the clouds parted and they were looking at both Larry Fujiyama and the slug. Of course, they were not in the same room; that would have been fatal to both. The Lothlrimarre barge was a giant pressure vessel. Inside, pressure and atmosphere were just comfy for the slug—about a thousand bars of ammonia and hydrogen. There was a terrarium for human visitors. The current view showed the slug in the foreground. Part of the wall behind him was transparent, a window into the terrarium. Larry gave a little wave, and Hamid felt himself smiling. No question who was in a zoo.
“Ah, Mr. Thompson. I’m glad you called. We have a very serious problem.” The slug’s English was perfect, and though the voice was artificial, he sounded like a perfectly normal Middle American male. “Many problems would be solved if you could see your way clear to give—”
“No.” Hamid’s voice was flat, “N-not while I’m alive, anyway. This is no business deal. You’ve heard the threats, and you saw what they did to my father.” The slug had been his ultimate employer these last six months, someone rarely spoken to, the object of awe. None of that mattered now. “You’ve always said the first responsibility of the Tour Director is to see that no party is abused by another. I’m asking you to live up to that.”
“Um. Technically, I was referring to you Middle Americans and the Tourists in my caravan. I know I have the power to make good on my promises with them…But we’re just beginning to learn about Ravna&Tines. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to stand up against them.” He swiveled his thousand-kilo bulk toward the terrarium window. Hamid knew that under Lothlrimarre gravity the slug would have been squashed into the shape of a flatworm, with his manipulator fringe touching the ground. At one gee, he looked more like an overstuffed silk pillow, fringed with red tassles. “Larry has told me about Skandr’s remarkable Slow Zone device. I’ve heard of such things. They are very difficult to obtain. A single one would have more than financed my caravan…And to think that Skandr pleaded his foundation’s poverty in begging passage…Anyway, Larry has been using the ‘ansible’ to ask about what your blabber really is.”
Larry nodded. “Been at it since you left, Hamid. The machine’s down in my office, buzzing away. Like Skandr says, it is aligned on the commercial outlet at Lothlrimarre. From there I have access to the Known Net. Heh, heh. Skandr left a sizable credit bond at Lothlrimarre. I hope he and Ortega aren’t too upset by the phone bill I run up testing this gadget for them. I described the Blab, and put out a depth query. There are a million subnets, all over the Beyond, searching their databases for anything like the Blab. I—” His happy enthusiasm wavered, “Sluggo thinks we’ve dug up a reference to the blabber’s race…”
“Yes, and it’s frightening, Mr. Thompson.” It was no surprise that none of the Tourists had heard of a blabber. The only solid lead coming back to Larry had been from halfway around the galactic rim, a nook in the Beyond that had only one occasional link with the rest of the Known Net. That far race had no direct knowledge of the blabbers. But they heard rumors. From a thousand light years below them, deep within the Slow Zone, there came stories…of a race matching the Blab’s appearance. The race was highly intelligent, and had quickly developed the relativistic transport that was the fastest thing inside the Zone. They colonized a vast sphere, held an empire of ten thousand worlds—all without ftl. And the tines—the name seemed to fit—had not held their empire through the power of brotherly love. Races had been exterminated, planets busted with relativistic kinetic energy bombs. The tines’ technology had been about as advanced and deadly as could exist in the Zone. Most of their volume was a tomb now, their story whispered through centuries of slow flight toward the Outside.
“Wait, wait. Prof Fujiyama told me the ansible’s bandwidth is a tenth of a bit per second. You’ve had less than twelve hours to work this question. How can you possibly know all this?”
Larry looked a little embarrassed—a first as far as Hamid could remember. “We’ve been using the AI protocol I told you about. There’s massive interpolation going on at both ends of our link to Lothlrimarre.”
“I’ll bet!”
“Remember, Mr. Thompson, the data compression applies only to the first link in the chain. The Known Net lies in the Beyond. Bandwidth and data integrity are very high across most of its links.”
The slug sounded very convinced. But Hamid had read a lot about the Known Net; the notion was almost as fascinating as ftl travel itself. There was no way a world could have a direct link with all others—partly because of range limitations, mainly because of the number of planets involved. Similarly, there was no way a single “phone company” (or even ten thousand phone companies!) could run the thing. Most likely, the information coming to them from around the galaxy had passed through five or ten intermediate hops. The intermediates—not to mention the race on the far rim—were likely nonhuman. Imagine asking a question in English of someone who also speaks Spanish, and that person asking the question in Spanish of someone who understands Spanish and passes the question on in German. This was a million times worse. Next to some of the creatures Out There, the slug could pass for human!
Hamid said as much. “F-furthermore, even if this is what the sender meant, it could still be a lie! Look at what local historians did to Richard the Third, or Mohamet Rose.”
Lazy Larry smiled his polliwog smile, and Hamid realized they must have been arguing about this already. Larry put in, “There’s also this, sluggo: the nature of the identification. The tines must have something like hands. See any on Hamid’s Blabber?”
The slug’s scarlet fringe rippled three quick cycles. Agitation? Dismissal? “The text is still coming in. But I have a theory. You know, Larry, I’ve always been a great student of sex. I may be a ‘he’ only by courtesy, but I think sex is fascinating. It’s what makes the ‘world go around’ for so many races.” Hamid suddenly understood Gilli Weinberg’s success. “So. Grant me my expertise. My guess is the tines exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism. The males’ forepaws probably are hands. No doubt it’s the males who are the killers. The females—like the Blab—are by contrast friendly, mindless creatures.”
The Blab’s eyes rolled back to look at Hamid. “Sure, sure,” she murmured. The accident of timing was wonderful, seeming to say Who is this clown?
The slug didn’t notice. “This may even explain the viciousness of the male. Think back to the conversation Mr. Thompson had. These creatures seem to regard their own females as properly to exploit. Rather the ultimate in sexism.” Hamid shivered. That did ring a bell. He couldn’t forget the hunger in the tines’s voice.
“Is this the long way to tell me you’re not going to protect us?”
The slug was silent for almost fifteen seconds. Its scarlet fringe waved up and down the whole time. Finally: “Almost, I’m afraid. My caravan customers haven’t heard this analysis, just the threats and the news broadcasts. Nevertheless, they are tourists, not explorers. They demand that I ref
use to let you aboard. Some demand that we leave your planet immediately…How secure is this line, Larry?”
Fujiyama said, “Underground fiberoptics, and an encrypted laser link. Take a chance, sluggo.”
“Very well. Mr. Thompson, here is what you can expect from me:
“I can stay over the city, and probably defend against direct kidnapping—unless I see a planetbuster coming. I doubt very much they have that set up, but if they do—well, I don’t think even you would want to keep your dignity at the price of a relativistic asteroid strike.
“I can not come down to pick you up. That would be visible to all, a direct violation of my customers’ wishes. On the other hand,” there was another pause, and his scarlet fringe whipped about even faster than before, “if you should appear, uh, up here, I would take you aboard my barge. Even if this were noticed, it would be a fait accompli. I could hold off my customers, and likely our worst fate would be a premature and unprofitable departure from Middle America.”
“T-that’s very generous.” Unbelievably so. The slug was thought to be an honest fellow—but a very hard trader. Even Hamid had to admit that the claim on the slug’s honor was tenuous here, yet he was risking a twenty-year mission for it.
“Of course, if we reach that extreme, I’ll want a few years of your time once we reach the Outside. My bet is that hard knowledge about your Blabber might make up for the loss of everything else.”
A day ago, Hamid would have quibbled about contracts and assurances. Today, well, the alternative was Ravna&Tines…With Larry as witness, they settled on two years’ indenture and a pay scale.