by Vernor Vinge
HAMID HAD NEVER BEEN in space before. Under other circumstances, he would have reveled in the experience. The glimpse he’d had of Middle America from low orbit was like a beautiful dream. But now, all he could see through the floor of his cage was a bluish dot, nearly lost in the sun’s glare. He pushed hard against the clear softness, and rolled onto his back. It was harder than a one-handed pushup to do that. He guessed the mothership was doing four or five gees…and had been for hours.
When they had pulled him off the attack craft, Hamid had been semiconscious. He had no idea what acceleration that shark boat reached, but it was more than he could take. He remembered that glimpse of Middle America, blue and serene. Then…they’d taken the Blab—or her body—away. Who? There had been a human, the Ravna woman. She had done something to his hand; it wasn’t bleeding anymore. And…and there had been the Blabber, up and walking around. No, the pelt pattern had been all wrong. That must have been Tines. There had been the hissing voice, and some kind of argument with Ravna.
Hamid stared up at the sunlight on the ceiling and walls. His own shadow lay spread-eagled on the ceiling. In the first hazy hours, he had thought it was another prisoner. The walls were gray, seamless, but with scrape marks and stains, as though heavy equipment was used here. He thought there was a door in the ceiling, but he couldn’t remember for sure. There was no sign of one now. The room was an empty cubicle, featureless, its floor showing clear to the stars: surely not an ordinary brig. There were no toilet facilities—and at five gees they wouldn’t have helped. The air was thick with the stench of himself…Hamid guessed the room was an airlock. The transparent floor might be nothing more than a figment of some field generator’s imagination. A flick of a switch and Hamid would be swept away forever.
The Blabber gone, Pop gone, maybe Larry and the slug gone…Hamid raised his good hand a few centimeters and clenched his fist. Lying here was the first time he’d ever thought about killing anyone. He thought about it a lot now…It kept the fear tied down.
“Mr. Thompson.” Ravna’s voice. Hamid suppressed a twitch of surprise: after hours of rage, to hear the enemy. “Mr. Thompson, we are going to free fall in fifteen seconds. Do not be alarmed.”
So, airline courtesy of a sudden.
The force that had squished him flat these hours, that had made it an exercise even to breathe, slowly lessened. From beyond the walls and ceiling he heard small popping noises. For a panicky instant, it seemed as though the floor had disappeared and he was falling through. He twisted. His hand hit the barrier…and he floated slowly across the room, toward the wall that had been the ceiling. A door had opened. He drifted through, into a hall that would have looked normal except for the intricate pattern of grooves and ledges that covered the walls.
“Thirty meters down the hall is a latrine,” came Ravna’s voice. “There are clean clothes that should fit you. When you are done…when you are done, we will talk.”
Damn right. Hamid squared his shoulders and pulled himself down the hall.
SHE DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A KILLER. There was anger—tension?—on her face, the face of someone who has been awake a long time and has fought hard—and doesn’t expect to win.
Hamid drifted slowly into the—conference room? bridge?—trying to size everything up at once. It was a large room with a low ceiling. Moving across it was easy in zero gee, slow bounces from floor to ceiling and back. The wall curved around, transparent along most of its circumference. There were stars and night dark beyond.
Ravna had been standing in a splash of light. Now she moved back a meter, into the general dimness. Somehow she slipped her foot into the floor, anchoring herself. She waved him to the other side of a table. They stood in the half crouch of zero gee, less than two meters apart. Even so, she looked taller than he had guessed from the phone call. Her mass might be close to his. The rest of her was as he remembered, though she looked very tired. Her gaze flickered across him, and away. “Hello, Mr. Thompson. The floor will hold your foot, if you tap it gently.”
Hamid didn’t take the advice; he held onto the table edge and jammed his feet against the floor. He would have something to brace against if the time came to move quickly. “Where is my Blabber?” His voice came out hoarse, more desperate than demanding.
“Your pet is dead.”
There was a tiny hesitation before the last word. She was as bad a liar as ever. Hamid pushed back the rage: if the Blab was alive, there was something still possible beyond revenge. “Oh.” He kept his face blank.
“However, we intend to return you safely to home.” She gestured at the star fields around them. “The six-gee boost was to avoid unnecessary fighting with the Lothlrimarre being. We will coast outwards some further, perhaps even go into ram drive. But Mr. Tines will take you back to Middle America in one of our attack boats. There will be no problem to land you without attracting notice…perhaps on the western continent, somewhere out of the way.” Her tone was distant. He noticed that she never looked directly at him for more than an instant. Now she was staring just to one side of his face. He remembered the phone call, how she seemed to ignore his video. Up close, she was just as attractive as before—more. Just once he would like to see her smile. And somewhere there was unease that he could be so attracted by a murderous stranger.
If only, “If only I could understand why. Why did you kill the Blab? Why did you kill my father?”
Ravna’s eyes narrowed. “That cheating piece of filth? He is too tricky to kill. He was gone when we visited his farm. I’m not sure I have killed anyone on this operation. The Lothlrimarre is still functioning, I know that.” She sighed. “We were all very lucky. You have no idea what Tines has been like these last days…He called you last night.”
Hamid nodded numbly.
“Well, he was mellow then. He tried to kill me when I took over the ship. Another day like this and he would have been dead—and most likely your planet would have been so, too.”
Hamid remembered the Lothlrimarre’s theory about the tines’s need. And now that the creature had the Blab…“So now Tines is satisfied?”
Ravna nodded vaguely, missing the quaver in his voice. “He’s harmless now and very confused, poor guy. Assimilation is hard. It will be a few weeks…but he’ll stabilize, probably turn out better than he ever was.”
Whatever that means.
She pushed back from the table, stopped herself with a hand on the low ceiling. Apparently their meeting was over. “Don’t worry. He should be well enough to take you home quite soon. Now I will show you your—”
“Don’t rush him, Rav. Why should he want to go back to Middle America?” The voice was a pleasant tenor, human-sounding but a little slurred.
Ravna bounced off the ceiling. “I thought you were going to stay out of this! Of course the boy is going back to Middle America. That’s his home; that’s where he fits.”
“I wonder.” The unseen speaker laughed. He sounded cheerfully—joyfully—drunk. “Your name is shit down there, Hamid, did you know that?”
“Huh?”
“Yup. You slagged the Caravan’s entire shipment of fusion electrics. ’Course you had a little help from the Federal Police, but that fact is being ignored. Much worse, you destroyed most of the agrav units. Whee. Up, up and away. And there’s no way those can be replaced short of a trip back to the Outsi—”
“Shut up!” Ravna’s anger rode over the good cheer. “The agrav units were a cheap trick. Nothing that subtle can work in the Zone for long. Five years from now they would all have faded.”
“Sure, sure. I know that, and you know that. But both Middle America and the Tourists figure you’ve trashed this Caravan, Hamid. You’d be a fool to go back.”
Ravna shouted something in a language Hamid had never heard.
“English, Rav, English. I want him to understand what is happening.”
“He is going back!” Ravna’s voice was furious, almost desperate, “We agreed!”
“I know, Rav.” A
little of the rampant joy left the voice. It sounded truly sympathetic. “And I’m sorry. But I was different then, and I understand things better now…Hey, I’ll be down in a minute, okay?”
She closed her eyes. It’s hard to slump in free fall, but Ravna came close, her shoulders and arms relaxing, her body drifting slowly up from the floor. “Oh, Lord,” she said softly.
Out in the hall, someone was whistling a tune that had been popular in Marquette six months ago. A shadow floated down the walls, followed by…the Blab? Hamid lurched off the table, flailed wildly for a handhold. He steadied himself, got a closer look.
No. Not the Blab. It was of the same race certainly, but this one had an entirely different pattern of black and white. The great patch of black around one eye and white around the other would have been laughable…if you didn’t know what you were looking al: at last to sec Mr. Tines.
Man and alien regarded each other for a long moment. It was a little smaller than the Blab. It wore a checkered orange scarf about its neck. Its paws looked no more flexible than his Blab’s…but he didn’t doubt the intelligence that looked back from its eyes. The tines drifted to the ceiling, and anchored itself with a deft swipe of paw and talons. There were faint sounds in the air now, squeaks and twitters almost beyond hearing. If he listened close enough, Hamid guessed he would hear the hissing, too.
The tines looked at him, and laughed pleasantly—the tenor voice of a minute before. “Don’t rush me! I’m not all here yet.”
Hamid looked at the doorway. There were two more there, one with a jeweled collar—the leader? They glided through the air and tied down next to the first. Hamid saw more shadows floating down the hall.
“How many?” he asked.
“I’m six now.” He thought it was a different tines that answered, but the voice was the same.
The three floated in the doorway. One wore no scarf or jewelry…and looked very familiar.
“Blab!” Hamid pushed off the table. He went into a spin that missed the door by several meters. The Blabber—it must be her—twisted around and fled the room.
“Stay away!” For an instant the tines’s voice changed, held the same edge as the night before. Hamid stood on the wall next to the doorway and looked down the hall. The Blab was there, sitting on the closed door at the far end. Hamid’s orientation flipped…the hall could just as well be a deep, bright-lit well, with the Blab trapped at the bottom of it.
“Blab?” He said softly, aware of the tines behind him.
She looked up at him. “I can’t play the old games anymore, Hamid,” she said in her softest femvoice. He stared for a moment, uncomprehending. Over the years, the Blab said plenty of things that—by accident or in the listeners’ imagination—might seem humanly intelligent. Here, for the first time, he knew that he was hearing sense…And he guessed what Ravna meant when she said the Blab was dead.
Hamid backed away from the edge of the pit. He looked at the other tines, remembered that their speech came as easily from one as the other. “You’re like a hive of roaches, aren’t you?”
“A little,” the tenor voice came from somewhere among them.
“But telepathic,” Hamid said.
The one who had been his friend answered, but in the tenor voice: “Yes, between myselves. But it’s no sixth sense. You’ve known about it all your life. I like to talk a lot. Blabber.” The squeaking and the hissing: just the edge of all they were saying to each other across their two-hundred-kilohertz bandwidth. “I’m sorry I flinched. Myselves are still confused. I don’t know quite who I am.”
The Blab pushed off and drifted back into the bridge. She grabbed a piece of ceiling as she came even with Hamid. She extended her head toward him, tentatively, as though he were a stranger. I feel the same way about you, thought Hamid. But he reached out to brush her neck with his fingers. She twitched back, glided across the room to nestle among the other tines.
Hamid stared at them staring back. He had a sudden image: a pack of long-necked rats beadily analyzing their prey. “So. Who is the real Mr. Tines? The monster who’d smash a world, or the nice guy I’m hearing now?”
Ravna answered, her voice tired, distant. “The monster tines is gone…or going. Don’t you see? The pack was unbalanced. It was dying.”
“There were five in my pack, Hamid. Not a bad number: some of the brightest packs are that small. But I was down from seven—two of myselves had been killed. The ones remaining were mismatched, and only one of them was female.” Tines paused. “I know humans can go for years without contact with the opposite sex, and suffer only mild discomfort—”
Tell me about it.
“—but tines are very different. If a pack’s sex ratio gets too lopsided, especially if there is a mismatch of skills, then the mind disintegrates…Things can get very nasty in the process.” Hamid noticed that all the time it talked, the two tines next to the one with the orange scarf had been nibbling at the scarf’s knots. They moved quickly, perfectly coordinated, untying and retying the knots. Tines doesn’t need hands. Or put another way, he already had six. Hamid was seeing the equivalent of a human playing nervously with his tie.
“Ravna lied when she said the Blab is dead. I forgive her: she wants you off our ship, with no more questions, no more hassle. But the Blabber isn’t dead. She was rescued…from being an animal the rest of her life. And her rescue saved the pack. I feel so…happy. Better even than when I was seven. I can understand things that have been puzzles for years. Your Blab is far more language-oriented than any of my other selves. I could never talk like this without her.”
Ravna had drifted toward the pack. Now she had her feet planted on the floor beneath them. Her head brushed the shoulder of one, was even with the eyes of another. “Imagine the Blabber as like the verbal hemisphere of a human brain,” she said to Hamid.
“Not quite,” Tines said. “A human hemisphere can almost carry on by itself. The Blab by itself could never be a person.”
Hamid remembered how the Blab’s greatest desire had often seemed just to be a real person. And listening to this creature, he heard echoes of the Blab. It would be easy to accept what they were saying…Yet if you turned the words just a little, you had enslavement and rape—the slug’s theory with frosting.
Hamid turned away from all the eyes and looked across the star clouds. How much should I believe? How much should I seem to believe? “One of the Tourists wanted to sell us a gadget, an ‘ftl radio.’ Did you know that we used it to ask about the tines? Do you know what we found?” He told them about the horrors Larry had found around the galactic rim.
Ravna exchanged a glance with the tines by her head. For a moment the only sound was the twittering and hissing. Then Tines spoke. “Imagine the most ghastly villains of Earth’s history. Whatever they are, whatever holocausts they set, I assure you much worse has happened elsewhere…Now imagine that this regime was so vast, so effectively evil that no honest historians survived. What stories do you suppose would be spread about the races they exterminated?”
“Okay. So—”
“Tines are not monsters. On average, we are no more bloodthirsty than you humans. But we are descended from packs of wolf-like creatures. We are deadly warriors. Given reasonable equipment and numbers, we can outfight most anything in the Slow Zone.” Hamid remembered the shark pack of attack boats. With one animal in each, and radio communication…no team of human pilots could match their coordination. “We once were a great power in our part of the Slow Zone. We had enemies, even when there was no war. Would you trust creatures who live indefinitely, but whose personalities may drift from friendly to indifferent—even to inimical—as their components die and are replaced?”
“And you’re such a peach of a guy because you’ve got the Blab?”
“Yes! Though you liked…I know you would have liked me when I was seven. But the Blab has a lovely outlook; she makes it fun to be alive.”
Hamid looked at Ravna and the pack who surrounded her. So the ti
nes had been great fighters. That he believed. So they were now virtually extinct, having run into something even deadlier. That he could believe, too. Beyond that…he’d be a fool to believe anything. He could imagine Tines as a friend, he wanted Ravna as one. But all the talk, all the seeming argument—it could just as well be manipulation. One thing was sure: if he returned to Middle America, he would never know the truth. He might live the rest of his life safe and cozy, but he wouldn’t have the Blab, and he would never know what had really happened to her.
He gave Ravna a lopsided smile. “Back to square one then. I want passage to the Beyond with you.”
“Out of the question. I—I made that clear from the beginning.”
Hamid pushed nearer, stopped a meter in front of her. “Why won’t you look at me?” he said softly. “Why do you hate me so much?”
For a full second, her eyes looked straight into his. “I don’t hate you!” Her face clouded, as if she were about to weep. “It’s just that you’re such a God-damned disappointment!” She pushed back abruptly, knocking the tines out of her way.
He followed her slowly back to the conference table. She “stood” there, talking to herself in some unknown language. “She’s swearing to her ancestors,” murmured a tines that drifted close by Hamid’s head. “Her kind is big on that sort of thing.”
Hamid anchored himself across from her. He looked at her face. Young, no older than twenty it looked. But Outsiders had some control over aging. Besides, Ravna had spent at least the last ten years in relativistic flight. “You hired my—you hired Hussein Thompson to adopt me, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
She looked back at him for a moment, this time not flinching away. Finally she sighed. “Okay, I will try but…there are many things you from the Slow Zone do not understand. Middle America is close to the Beyond, but you see out through a tiny hole. You can have even less concept of what lies beyond the Beyond, in the Transhuman reaches.” She was beginning to sound like Lazy Larry.