by Vernor Vinge
Now things were changing. Jau Xin had been gone for more than four days, at least since the beginning of her current Watch. At first the rumor was that he and Rita had been unofficially moved to Watch tree C, and that they were still in coldsleep. That screwed some of the programming deals she had planned with Rita—and it was also as unusual as hell. Then Trinli reported that two pilot zipheads were missing from the Hammerfest Attic. So. Rita might still be on ice, but Jau Xin and his zipheads were…elsewhere. The rumors grew from there: Jau was on an expedition to the dead sun, Jau was landing on the Spider world. Trud Silipan strutted around Benny’s, smug with some inner secret that for once he was not sharing. More than anything, that proved that something very strange was going on.
Gonle had run a betting pool on the speculations, but she was suffering from sucker fever herself. She wasn’t one bit disappointed when the big bosses decided to let them all in on the secret.
Tomas Nau invited a handful of the peons down to his estate for the briefing. This was the first time Gonle had been to Lake Park since the open house. Nau had made a big thing of his hospitality then. Afterward, the place had been locked tight—though to be honest, part of that might be because of what happened to Anne Reynolt during the open house.
As Gonle and the three other chosen peons shuffled down the footpath toward Nau’s lodge, she passed her critical judgment on the scene. “So they figured out how to do rain.” It was more a windblown mist, so fine it dewed her hair and eyelashes, so fine that the lack of real gravity didn’t matter.
Pham Trinli gave a cynical chuckle. “I’ll bet it’s partly garbage collection. In my time, I’ve seen plenty of these faked gravity parks, usually built by some Customer with more money than sense. If you want to have a groundside and a skyside, the clutter starts piling up. Pretty soon you have a sky full of crap.”
Walking beside him, Trud Silipan said, “Sky looks pretty clean to me.”
Trinli looked up into the driven mist. The clouds were low and gray, moving quickly in from the lake’s far shore. Some of this was real and some must be wallpaper, but the two were seamlessly meshed. Not a cheerful scene by Gonle Fong’s standards, but one that was chill and clean. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I gotta hand it to you, Trud. Your Ali Lin is a genius.”
Silipan puffed up a little. “Not just him. It’s the coordination that counts. I’ve got a team of zipheads on this. Every year it just gets better. Someday we’ll even figure out how to make natural-looking sea waves.”
Gonle looked across at Ezr Vinh and rolled her eyes. Neither of these buffoons liked to acknowledge how much everyone’s cooperation—very profitable cooperation—was involved here. Even if the peons weren’t welcome anymore, they still supplied a constant stream of food, finished woods, live plants, and program designs.
The mist made little swirls around the lodge, and the illusion of gravity was sorely tested as the visitors tilted this way and that on their grabber-soled shoes. Then they were in the lodge, warmed by very natural-looking burning logs in Tomas Nau’s big fireplace. The Podmaster gestured them toward a conference table. There were Nau, Brughel, and Reynolt. Three other figures were silhouetted against the windows and the gray light beyond. One was Qiwi.
“Well hello, Jau,” said Ezr. “Welcome…back.”
Sure enough, it was Jau and Rita. Tomas Nau brightened the room lights. The warmth and brightness were nothing more than in any civilized habitation, but somehow the cold and gloom so expensively maintained outside made this inner light a joyous security.
The Podmaster waved them to seats, then sat down himself. As usual, Nau was a picture of generous and high-minded leadership. But he doesn’t fool me for a moment, thought Gonle. Before this mission, she had had a long career, dealing with a dozen Customer cultures, on three worlds. Customers came in all the sizes and colors of humanity. And their governments were even more varied—tyrannies, democracies, demarchies. There was always a way of doing business with them. Big boss Nau was a villain, but a smart villain who understood that he had to do business. Qiwi had seen to that, years ago. It was too bad he held the physical upper hand—that was not part of the standard Qeng Ho business environment. Things were dicey when you couldn’t run away from the bad guys. But in the long term, even that didn’t matter.
The Podmaster nodded to each of them. “Thanks for coming in person. You should know that this meeting is being shown live on the local net, but I hope you’ll tell your friends what you’ve seen firsthand.” He grinned. “I’m sure it will make for good conversation at Benny’s. What I have is incredibly good news, but it’s also a great challenge. You see, Pilot Manager Xin has just returned from low Arachna orbit.” He paused. I bet there’s total, awesome silence in Benny’s. “And what he discovered there is…interesting. Jau—please. Describe the mission.”
Xin came to his feet a little too quickly. His wife caught his hand and he stood on the floor, facing them. Gonle tried unsuccessfully to catch Rita’s eye, but the woman’s entire attention was on Jau. I bet they kept her on ice until he was back; that was the only thing that would have kept her mouth shut about this. Rita’s expression was one of vast relief. Whatever this news was, it couldn’t be bad.
“Yes, sir. Per your instructions, I was brought on-Watch early, to undertake a close approach of Arachna.” As he spoke, Qiwi passed around some Qeng Ho-quality huds. Gonle mouthed a buy offer at Qiwi as she passed; the other grinned and whispered “Soon!” back at her. The big bosses still didn’t let peons own these things. Maybe finally that would change, too. A second went by as the huds synched on the consensus image. The space above the table rippled and became a view of the L1 rockpile. Far away, beyond the floor, there was the disk of the Spider world.
“My pilots and I took the last functioning pinnace.” A thread of gold arced out from the rockpile; the tip accelerated to the halfway point and then began to slow. Their pov caught up with the pinnace; ahead, the disk of Arachna grew wide. The world looked almost as frozen and dead as when the humans had first arrived. There was one big difference: a faint glitter of city lights across the northern hemisphere, webbing here and there at major cities.
Pham Trinli’s voice came from beyond the dark, an incredulous hoot. “I bet you got spotted!”
“They pinged us. Show the defense radars and native satellites,” he said to the display. A cloud of blue and green dots blossomed in the space around the planet. On the ground, there were arcs of flashing light, the sweep of the Spiders’ missile radars. “It’s going to be more of a problem in the future.”
Anne Reynolt’s voice cut across the Pilot Manager’s. “My network people deleted all the hard evidence. The risk was well worth it.”
“Hunh! That must have been something motherloving important.”
“Oh Pham, tas. Tas.” Jau stepped to one side of the consensus image, and jabbed his hand deep into the haze of satellites, marking one blue dot with the label KINDRED GROUND RECON SATELLITE 543 followed by orbital parameters He glanced in Pham’s direction, and there was a quiet smile on his face, as if he were expecting some reaction. The numbers didn’t mean anything to Gonle. She leaned to one side, looked at Trinli around the edge of the image. The old fraud looked just as mystified as any, and not at all happy with Xin’s smile or Silipan’s smug chuckle.
Trinli squinted into the display. “Okay, so you matched orbits with Recon543.” Beside him, Ezr Vinh sucked in a surprised breath. This made Trinli’s frown even deeper. “Launch date seven hundred Ksec ago, booster chemical, period synchronous, altitude…” His voice trailed off in a kind of gargle. “Altitude twelve thousand damn-all kilometers! That must be a mistake.”
Jau’s grinned widened. “No mistake. That’s the whole reason I went down for a close look.”
The significance finally percolated through to Gonle. In Supplies and Services, she dealt mainly with bargaining and inventory managment. But shipping was a big part of price points, and she was Qeng Ho. Arachna was a t
errestroid planet, with a 90Ksec day. Synchronous altitude should have been way higher than twelve thousand klicks. Even for a nontechnical person, the satellite was a magical impossibility. “It’s stationkeeping?” she asked. “Little rockets?”
“No. Even fusion rockets would have trouble doing that for days at a time.”
“Cavorite.” Ezr’s voice was faint, awed. Where had she heard that word before?
But Jau was nodding. “Right.” He said something to the display, and now the view was from his pinnace. “Getting a close look was a problem, especially since I didn’t want to show my main torch. Instead, I fried the satellite’s cameras and then did an instantaneous match from below… You can begin to see it now, at the center of my target pointer. The closing speed has fallen from fifty meters a second, to an instant now where we’re stopped relative to each other. It’s about five meters above us now.” There was something in the pointer, something boxy and dead black, falling toward them like a yo-yo on a string. It slowed, passed a meter or two below them, and started back up. The topside was not black but an irregular pattern of dark grays. “Okay, freeze the image. This should give you a good look. A flat architecture, probably gyro-stabilized. The polyhedral shell is for radar evasion. Except for the impossible orbit, this thing is a typical low-tech stealthed satellite…” The satellite slid upward again, but this time was met by grappling hooks. “This is where we took it aboard the pinnace—and left behind a credible explosion.”
“Good flying, man.” That from Pham Trinli, acknowledging someone almost as good as himself.
“Ha. Tas even tougher than it looks. I had to run my zipheads near the edge of a nonrecoverable panic all through the rendezvous. There were just too many inconsistencies in the dynamics.”
Silipan interrupted cheerily, “That will change. We’re reprogramming all the pilots for cavorite maneuvers.”
Jau killed the imagery and frowned at Silipan. “You screw up, and we’ll have no pilots.”
Gonle couldn’t take much more irrelevant chitchat. “The satellite. You have it here? How did the Spiders do this?”
She noticed Nau grinning at her. “I think Miss Fong has identified the immediate issue. Do you remember those stories of gravity anomalies in the altiplano? The short of it is, those stories were true. The Kindred military discovered some kind of—call it antigravity. Apparently they’ve been pursuing this for ten years now. We never caught on because Accord Intelligence missed it, and our penetration of the Kindred side has always lagged. This little satellite massed eight tonnes, but almost two tonnes of that was ‘cavorite’ cladding. The Kindred Spiders are using this remarkable substance simply to increase their rockets’ throw weight. I have a little demonstration for you…”
He spoke to the air. “Douse the fireplace, cut ventilation.” He paused, and the room became very quiet. Over by the wall, Qiwi closed a tall window that had drawn a taste of moistness in from the lake. The park’s fake sun peeked between breaks in the clouds, and streamers of light glittered on the water. Gonle wondered vaguely if Nau’s zipheads were so good that they could orchestrate his world for these moments. Probably.
The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. “This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we’ve stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch.” He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched… And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling…straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink—and remained there.
No one said anything for several seconds.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we came to the OnOff star hoping for treasure. So far we’ve learned some new astrophysics, developed a slightly better ramdrive. The biologicals of the Spider world are another treasure, also enough to finance our coming. But originally, we expected more. We expected to find the remains of a starfaring race—well, after forty years, it looks like we have succeeded. Spectacularly.”
Maybe it was just as well that Nau had not scheduled this as a general meeting. Everyone was suddenly talking at once. Lord only knew what it was like over at Benny’s. Ezr Vinh finally got a question on the floor. “You think the Spiders made this stuff?”
Nau shook his head. “No. The Kindred had to mine thousands of tonnes of low-grade ore to get this much magic.”
Trinli said, “We’ve known for years that the Spiders evolved here, that they never had a higher tech.”
“Quite so. And their own archeologists have no solid evidence of visitations. But this…this stuff is an artifact, even if only we can see it as such. Anne’s automation has spent several days on this. It’s a coordinated processing matrix.”
“I thought you said it was refined from native ores.”
“Yes. It makes the conclusion all the more fantastic. For forty years we’ve thought the diamond powders of Arachna were either infalls or biological skeletons. Now it looks like they are fossil processing devices. And at least some of them reassert their mission when brought close together. Like localizers, but much much smaller, and with a special purpose…to manipulate physical laws in ways we don’t begin to understand.”
Trinli looked as if someone had punched him in the face, as if decades of bombast had been beaten out of him. He said softly, “Nanotech. The dream.”
“What? Yes, the Failed Dream. Till now.” The Podmaster looked up at the tile lying on the ceiling. He smiled. “Whoever visited here, it was millions or billions of years ago. I doubt we’ll ever find any camp tents or garbage middens…but the signs of their technology are everywhere.”
Vinh: “We were looking for starfarers, but we were too small and all we saw were their ankles.” He tore his gaze down from the ceiling. “Maybe even these—” He waved at the window, and Gonle realized that he was talking about the big diamonds of L1. “Maybe even these are artifacts.”
Brughel moved forward in his chair. “Nonsense. They are simple diamond rocks.” But there was an edge of uncertainty in the aggressive look he flashed around the table.
Nau hesitated an instant, then gave an easy chuckle, waving his thug silent. “We’re all beginning to sound like some Dawn Age fantasy. The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo. With what we already have, this expedition may be the most important in human history.”
And the most profitable, too. Gonle shifted back on her chair, and tried to catalogue all the things they might do with the glittering material that was lying on the ceiling. What’s the best way to sell something like that? How many centuries of monopoly might be wrung out of it?
But the Podmaster had returned to more practical matters. “So that’s the fantastic news. In the long term, it is good beyond our wildest dreams. In the short term—well, it puts a real knot in the Schedule. Qiwi?”
“Yes. As you know, the Spiders are about five years from having a mature planetary computer network, something we can reliably act through.”
Something advanced enough that we can use. Until today, that had been the biggest treasure that Gonle Fong had envisioned coming out of these years of exile. Forget about marginal advances in ramdrives or even biologicals. There was a whole industrialized world down there, with a culture guaranteed to be alien from other markets. If they controlled that, or even had a dominant bargaining position, they would rank with the legends of the Qeng Ho marketing. Gonle understood that. Surely Nau did. Qiwi did too, though right now she was talking simple idealism:
“Till now, we thought that they were also
about five years away from really needing our help. We thought that any Kindred/Accord war wouldn’t happen till then. Well…we were wrong. The Kindred don’t have much of a computer net—but they do have the cavorite mines. Their cavorite satellites are stealthed for now, but that’s only for temporary advantage. Very soon, their missile fleet will be upgraded. Politically, we see them moving to subvert smaller countries, egging them into confrontation with the Accord. We simply can’t wait another five years to take a hand in things.”
Jau said, “There are other reasons for advancing the deadlines. With this cavorite, it’s going to be next to impossible to keep our operations a secret much longer. The Spiders are going to be out in local space very soon. Depending on how much of that”—he jerked his thumb at the glistening tile on the ceiling—“they have, they may actually be more maneuverable than we are.”
Beside him, Rita was looking more and more upset. “You mean there’s a chance Pedure’s crowd could win? If we have to advance the Schedule, then it’s time we stopped pussyfooting. We need to come down with military force, on the side of the Accord.”
The Podmaster nodded solemnly in Liao’s direction. “I hear you, Rita. There are people down there that we’ve all come to respect, even to—” He waved his hand as if to push aside deeper sentiments, to concentrate on hard reality. “But as your Podmaster, I have to look at priorities: My highest priority is the survival of you and all the humans in our little pod. Don’t mistake the beauty you have all created here. The truth is, we have precious little real military power.” The setting sun had turned the lake to gold, and now the slanting rays lit the meeting room with a gentle, even warmth. “In fact, we are almost castaways, and we are about as far from Humankind as anyone has ever been. Our second priority—and it’s inextricably bound to the first—is the survival of the Spiders’ advanced industrial civilization, and therefore its people and their culture. We must act very carefully. We can’t act out of simple affection… And you know, I listen to the translations, too. I think that people like Victory Smith and Sherkaner Underhill would understand.”