Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  Qiwi hovered over an access hatch. Suddenly her shoulders and arms were tense. Strange, random thoughts skittered through her mind. I will remember. I will remember. Freaky craziness.

  Beyond this point, her only invisibility would be in her Podmaster passkey. Very likely that would not be enough. But I just need a few seconds. Qiwi checked her recorder and data link one last time…and slipped through the hatch, into a crew corridor.

  Lord. For a moment, Qiwi just stared in astonishment. The corridor was the size that she remembered. Ten meters farther on, it curved right, toward the Captain’s living quarters. But Ritser had pasted wallpaper on all four walls, and the pictures were a kind of swirling pink. The air stank of animal musk. This was a different universe from the Invisible Hand that she had known. She grasped wildly at her courage, and moved slowly up the hallway. Now there was music ahead, at least the thump thump thump of percussion. Somebody was singing…sharp, barking screams, in time with the beat.

  Like they had a life of their own, her shoulders cramped tight, aching to bounce off the wall and race back the way she had come. Do I need any more proof? Yes. Just a look at the data system with a local override. That would mean more than any number of hysterical stories about Ritser’s choice of video and music.

  Door by door, she moved up the corridor. These had been staff officer quarters, but used by the Watch crew on the voyage from Triland. She had lived in the second room from the end for three years—and she really didn’t want to know what that looked like now. The Captain’s planning room was just beyond the bend. She flicked her passkey at the lock, and the door slid open. Inside…this was no planning room. It looked like a cross between a gym and a bedroom. And the walls were again covered with video wallpaper. Qiwi pulled herself over a strange, gauntleted rack and settled down, out of sight of the doorway. She touched her huds, asked for a local override connection to the ship’s net. There was a pause as her location and authorization were checked, and then she was looking at names and dates and pictures. Yes! Ol’ Ritser was running his own small-scale coldsleep business right here on the Invisible Hand. Luan Peres was listed…and here she was listed as living, on-Watch!

  That’s enough; time to get out of this madhouse. But Qiwi hesitated an instant longer. There were so many names here, familiar names and faces from long ago. Little death glyphs sat by each picture. She had been a child when she last saw these people, but not like this…these faces were variously sullen, sleeping, terribly bruised or burned. The living, the dead, the beaten, the fiercely resisting. This is from before Jimmy Diem. She knew there had been interrogations, a period of many Ksecs between the fighting and the resumption of Watches, but…Qiwi felt a numb horror spreading up from the pit of her stomach. She paged through the names. Kira Pen Lisolet. Mama. A bruised face, the eyes staring steadily back at her. What did Ritser do to you? How could Tomas not know? She wasn’t really conscious of following the data links from that picture, but suddenly her huds were running an immersion video. The room was the same, but filled with the sights and sounds of long ago. As if from the other side of the rack, there came the sound of panting and moaning. Qiwi slid to the side and the vision tracked with near perfection. Around the corner of the rack, she came face-to-face with…Tomas Nau. A younger Tomas Nau. Out of sight, beyond the edge of the rack, he seemed to be thrusting from his hips. The look on his face was the sort of ecstatic pleasure that Qiwi had seen in his face so many times, the look he had when they could finally be alone and he could come in her. But this Tomas of years ago held a tiny, red-splattered knife. He leaned forward, out of sight, leaned down on someone whose moans changed to a shrill scream. Qiwi pulled herself over the edge of the rack and looked straight down at the true past, at the woman Nau was cutting.

  “Mama!” The past didn’t notice her cry; Nau continued his business. Qiwi doubled up on herself, spewing vomit across the rack and beyond. She couldn’t see them anymore, but the sounds of the past continued, as if they were happening just on the other side of the rack. Even as her stomach emptied, she tore the huds from her face, threw them wildly away. She choked and gagged; gibbering horror was in charge of her reflexes.

  The light changed as the room’s door opened. There were voices. Voices in the present. “Yeah, she’s in here, Marli.”

  “Phew. What a mess.” Sounds of the two men quartering the room, coming closer to Qiwi’s hiding place. Mindlessly she retreated, floated down beneath the nightmare equipment, and braced herself against the floor.

  A face coasted across her position.

  “Got h—”

  Qiwi exploded upward, the blade of her hand just missing the other’s neck. She slammed into the wall partition behind him. Pain lanced back along her arm.

  She felt the prick of stunner darts. She turned, tried to bounce toward her attacker, but her legs were already dead. The two waited cautiously a second. Then the shooter, Marli, grinned and snagged her slowly-turning body. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe. But there was some sensation. She felt Marli draw her back to him, run his hand across her breasts. “She’s safe; don’t worry, Tung.” Marli laughed. “Or maybe you should worry. Look at that hole she put in the wall. Another four centimeters and you’d be breathing out the back of your neck!”

  “Pus.” Tung’s voice was sullen.

  “You got her? Good.” It was Tomas’s voice, from the door. Marli abruptly released his hold on her breasts. He coasted her around the equipment, into the open.

  Qiwi couldn’t turn her head. She saw whatever happened to be before her eyes. Tomas, calm as ever. Calm as ever. He glanced at her in passing, nodded to Marli. Qiwi tried to scream, but no sound came. Tomas will kill me, like all the others… But if he doesn’t? If he doesn’t, then nothing in God’s universe can save him.

  Tomas turned. Ritser Brughel was behind him, disheveled and half-naked. “Ritser, this is inexcusable. The whole point of giving her access codes is to make capture predictable and easy. You knew she was coming, and you left yourself wide open.”

  Brughel’s voice was whiny. “Plague take it. She’s never twigged this soon after her last scrub. And I had less than three hundred seconds from your first warning till she arrived here. That’s never happened before.”

  Tomas glared at his Vice-Podmaster. “The second was just bad luck—something you should count on. The first…” He looked back at Qiwi, and his anger turned to thoughtfulness. “Something unexpected triggered her this time. Have Kal review just who she’s been talking to.”

  He gestured to Marli and Tung. “Put her in a box and take her down to Hammerfest. Tell Anne I want the usual.”

  “What cutoff time on the memories, sir?”

  “I’ll talk to Anne about that myself. We’ve got some records to look at.”

  Qiwi got a glimpse of the corridor, of hands dragging her along. How many times has this happened before? No matter how hard she strained, she couldn’t move a muscle. Inside she was screaming. This time I will remember. I will remember!

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pham followed Trud Silipan up the central tower of Hammerfest, toward the Attic. In a sense, this was the moment he had been angling for through Msecs of casual shmoozing—an excuse to get inside the Focus system, to see more than the results. No doubt he could have gotten here earlier—in fact, Silipan had offered more than once to show him around. Over the Watches they had known each other, Pham had made enough silly assertions about Focus, had bet Silipan and Xin enough scrip about his opinions; a plausible visit was inevitable. But there was plenty of time and Pham had never had quite the cover he’d wanted. Don’t fool yourself. Popping the localizers on Tomas Nau has put you in more danger than anything so far.

  “Now, finally, you’re going to see behind the scenes, Pham old boy. After this, I hope you’ll shut up about some of your crazy theories.” Silipan was grinning; clearly, he’d been looking forward to this moment himself.

  They drifted upward, past narrow tunnels that forked and for
ked. The place was a warren.

  Pham pulled himself even with the coasting Silipan. “What’s to know? So you Emergents can make people into automatic devices. So what? Even a ziphead can’t multiply numbers faster than once or twice a second. Machines can do it trillions of times faster. So with zipheads, you get the pleasure of bossing people around—and for what? The slowest, crappiest automation since Humankind learned to write.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’ve been saying that for years. But you’re still wrong.” He stuck out a foot, catching a stop with the toe of his shoe. “Keep your voice down inside the grouproom, okay?” They were facing a real door, not one of the little crawl hatches of lower down. Silipan waved it open and they drifted through. Pham’s first impression was of body odor and packed humanity.

  “They do get pretty ripe, don’t they? They’re healthy, though. I see to that.” He spoke with a technician’s pride.

  There was rack on rack of micro-gee seating, packed in a three-dimensional lattice that would have been impossible in any real gravity. Most of the seats were occupied. There were men and women of all ages, dressed in grays, most using what looked to be premium Qeng Ho head-up display devices. This wasn’t what he had been expecting. “I thought you kept them isolated,” in little cells such as Ezr Vinh had described in more than one tearful session in the booze parlor.

  “Some we do. It depends on the application.” He waved at the room attendants, two men dressed like hospital orderlies. “This is a lot cheaper. Two guys can handle all the potty calls, and the usual fights.”

  “Fights?”

  “‘Professional disagreements.’” Silipan chuckled. “Snits, really. They’re only dangerous if they upset the mindrot’s balance.”

  They floated diagonally upward between the close-packed rows. Some of the huds flickered transparently and he could see the zipheads’ eyes moving. But no one seemed to notice Pham and Trud; their vision was elsewhere.

  There was low-pitched mumbling from all directions, the combined voices of all the zipheads in the room. There were a lot of people talking, all in short bursts of words—Nese, but still nonsense. The global effect was an almost hypnotic chant.

  The zipheads typed ceaselessly on chording keyboards. Silipan pointed to their hands with special pride. “See, not one in five has any joint damage; we can’t afford to lose people. We have so few, and Reynolt can’t completely control the mindrot. But it’s been most of a year since we had a simple medical fatality—and that was almost unavoidable. Somehow the zip got a punctured colon right after a clean checkup. He was an isolated specialty. His performance fell off, but we didn’t know there was a problem till the smell got completely rank.” So the slave had died from the inside out, too dedicated to cry his pain, too neglected for anyone to notice. Trud Silipan was only caring in the mean.

  They reached the top, looked back down the lattice of mumbling humanity. “Now in one way you’re right, Mr. Armsman Trinli. If these people were doing arithmetic or string sorting, this operation would be a joke. The smallest processor in a finger ring can do that sort of thing a billion times faster than any human. But you hear the zipheads talking?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s internal jargon; they get into that pretty fast when we work them in teams. But the point is, they’re not doing low-level machine functions. They’re using our computer resources. See, for us Emergents, the zipheads are the next system layer above software. They can apply human intelligence, but with the persistence and patience of a machine. And that’s also why unFocused specialists—especially techs like me—are important. Focus is useless unless there are normal people to direct it and to find the proper balance of hardware and software and Focus. Done right, the combination is totally beyond what you Qeng Ho ever achieved.”

  Pham had long ago understood that, but denying the point provoked steadily more detailed explanations from Emergents like Trud Silipan. “So what is this group actually doing?”

  “Let’s see.” He motioned for Pham to put on his huds. “Ah, see? We have them partitioned into three groups. The top third is rote-layer processing, zipheads that can be easily retargeted. They’re great for routine tasks, like direct queries. The middle third is programming. As a Programmer-at-Arms, this should interest you.” He popped up some dependency charts. They were squirrelly nonsense, immense blocks with no evolutionary coherence. “This is a rewrite of your own weapons targeting code.”

  “Crap. I could never maintain something like that.”

  “No, you couldn’t. But a Programmer-Manager—someone like Rita Liao—can, as long as she has a team of ziphead programmers. She’s having them rearrange and optimize the code. They’ve done what ordinary humans could do if they could concentrate endlessly. Together with good development software, these zips have produced a code that is about half the size of your original—and five times as fast on the same hardware. They also combed out hundreds of bugs.”

  Pham didn’t say anything for a moment. He just paged through the maze of the dependency charts. Pham had hacked for years at the weapons programs. Sure there were bugs, as there were in any large system. But the weapons code had been the object of thousands of years of work, of constant effort to optimize and remove flaws… He cleared his huds and looked across the ranked slaves. Such a terrible price to pay…for such wonderful results.

  Silipan chuckled. “Can’t fool me, Trinli. I can tell you’re impressed.”

  “Yeah, well if it works I am. So what’s the third group doing?”

  But Silipan was already heading back to the entrance. “Oh, them.” He waved negligently at the zipheads on his right. “Reynolt’s ongoing project. We’re going through the corpus of your fleet system code, looking for trapdoors, that sort of thing.”

  It was the wild-goose chase that preoccupied the most paranoid system administrators, but after what he’d just seen…suddenly Pham didn’t feel quite so secure. How long do I have before they notice some of my long-ago mods?

  They left the grouproom and started back down the central tower. “See, Pham, you—all you Qeng Ho—grew up wearing blinders. You just know certain things are impossible. I see the clichés in your literature: ‘Garbage input means garbage output’ ‘The trouble with automation is that it does exactly what you ask it’ ‘Automation can never be truly creative.’ Humankind has accepted such claims for thousands of years. But we Emergents have disproved them! With ziphead support, I can get correct performance from ambiguous inputs. I can get effective natural language translation. I can get human-quality judgment as part of the automation!”

  They coasted downward at several meters per second; upward traffic was sparse just now. The light at the bottom of the tower glowed brighter. “Yeah, so what about creativity?” This was something Trud loved to pontificate on.

  “Even that, Pham. Well, not all forms of creativity. Like I said, there is a real need for managers such as Rita and myself, and the Podmasters above us. But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books? As often as not, they’re some poor dweeb who doesn’t have a life. He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic. A sane person couldn’t justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard. Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected. See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race. We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.”

  Silipan reached out, lightly touching the walls on both sides, slowing his descent. He dropped behind for a moment before Pham started braking too.

  “How long till your appointment with Anne Reynolt?” Silipan asked.

  “Just over a Ksec.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep this short. Can’t keep the boss lady waiting.” He laughed. Silipan seemed to have an especially low regard for Anne Reynolt. If she were incompetent, a lot o
f things would be simpler for Pham…

  They passed through a pressure door, into what might have been a sickbay. There were a few coldsleep coffins; they looked like medical temporaries. Visible behind the equipment was another door, this one bearing a Podmaster special seal. Trud gave a nervous glance in that direction, and did not look back again.

  “So. Here’s where it all happens, Pham. The real magic of Focus.” He dragged Pham across the room, away from the half-hidden door. A technician was working by the limp form of a ziphead, maneuvering the “patient’s” head into one of the large toroids that dominated the room. Those might be diagnostic imagers, though they were even clunkier-looking than most Emergent hardware.

  “You already know the basic principles, right, Pham?”

  “Sure.” Those had been carefully explained in the first Watch after Jimmy’s murder. “You’ve got this special virus, the mindrot; you infected us all.”

  “Right, right. But that was a military operation. In most cases the rot didn’t get past the blood/brain barrier. But when it does…You know about glial cells? You’ve got lots more of those in your brain than neurons, actually. Anyway, the rot uses the glials as a kind of broth, infects almost all of them. After four days or so—”

  “—You have a ziphead?”

  “No. You have the raw material for a ziphead; many of you Qeng Ho ended up in that state—unFocused, perfectly healthy, but with the infection permanently established. In such people, every neuron in the brain is adjacent to infection cells. And each rotted cell has a menu of neuro-actives it can secrete. Now, this guy—” He turned to the tech, who was still working on the comatose ziphead. “Bil, what is this one in for?”