Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  Blame-assignment time. It had been part of each of the recent staff meetings, and each time Thract had been more the target.

  Thract gave a little bow in Megadeath’s direction. “Sir, your assessment is generally correct, though I see little infiltration of the Southland rocket forces, per se. We had a friendly government there—and one that I would swear was carefully ‘instrumented’ with Accord agents. The Kindred were active, but we had them stymied. Then, step by step, we lost ground. At first, it was bungled surveillance, then fatal accidents, then assassinations we weren’t quick enough to block. Lately there have been trumped-up criminal prosecutions… Our enemy is clever.”

  “So the Honored Pedure is a genius beyond our ken?” asked the Director of Air Defense. Sarcasm dripped.

  Thract was silent for a moment. His eating hands twisted back and forth. At earlier meetings, this was where he would counterattack with statistics and fine new projects. Now—something seemed to break inside him. Belga Underville had counted Thract as a bureaucratic enemy ever since the chief’s children were kidnapped, but now she felt embarrassed for him. When Thract finally spoke, his voice came out an anguished squeak. “No! Don’t you know I…I’ve had friends die; I’ve lost others because I began mistrusting them. For a long time, I thought there must be a Kindred agent high in my own organization. I shared critical information with fewer and fewer people, not even with my own superior—” He nodded at General Smith. “In the end, there were secrets plucked from us that only I knew and which I communicated with my own crypto equipment.”

  There was silence, as the obvious consequence of these claims hardened in the minds of his audience. Thract’s attention seemed to turn inward, as if he didn’t care that others thought he might be the Father of All Traitors. He continued more quietly, “As far as one person can be a paranoid and be everywhere, so I have been. I have used different comm paths, different crypto. I have used differential frauds… And I tell you, our enemy is something more than any single ‘Honored Pedure.’ Somehow, all of our clever science is working against us.”

  “Nonsense!” said Air Defense. “My department uses more of what you call ‘clever science’ than anyone, and we are entirely satisfied with the results. In competent hands, computers and networks and satellite reconnaissance are incredibly powerful tools. Just look at what our deep analysis did with the unidentified radar sightings. Certainly, networks can be abused. But we are the world’s leaders in these technologies. And no matter what else may be broken we have a completely robust encryption technology… Or do you claim the enemy can break our crypto?”

  Thract swayed slightly from his place behind the podium. “No, that was my first great suspicion, but we had penetrated to the heart of the Kindred’s encryption establishment—and we were safely there until very recently. If I trust anything, it is that they can’t break our encryption.” He waved at them all. “You really don’t understand, do you? I tell you, there is some force in our networks, something that is actively opposing us. No matter what we do, It knows more and It is supporting our enemies…”

  The scene was pathetic, a kind of abject collapse. Thract was left with nothing but phantoms to explain his failures. Maybe Pedure really was clever beyond all imagination; more likely, Thract was a Father Traitor.

  Belga watched the chief with half her attention. General Smith was deep in the King’s trust. No doubt she could survive Thract’s collapse simply by starkly disowning him.

  Smith beckoned the guard sergeant by the door. “Help Colonel Thract to the staff office. Colonel, I’ll be along to talk to you in a few minutes. Consider yourself as still on duty.”

  It seemed to take a second for the words to penetrate Thract’s funk. He was headed out the door, but apparently not for arrest or even imminent quizzing by underlings. “Yes, ma’am.” He straightened to a semblance of smartness and followed the sergeant out.

  The room was very quiet after Thract’s departure. Belga could tell that everyone was watching everyone else, and thinking very dark thoughts. Finally, General Smith said, “My friends, the Colonel has a point. No doubt we are infested with deep-cover Kindred agents. But they are effective across much too large a range of our departments. There is some systematic flaw in our security, and yet we have no idea what it is Now you see the reason for the Lighthill team.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  It was forty years since the OnOff star had last come to life. Ritser Brughel had not been on-Watch all that time, yet still the Exile had consumed years of his life. And now it was drawing to an end. What had been years was now a matter of days. In less than four days, he would be vice-ruler of a world.

  Brughel hung over the shoulder of the ziphead operating the remote lander, and quietly watched what the tiny device was sending back. A few seconds earlier, the lander had come out of its brake and spread its meter-wide wings. Still forty kilometers up, they had ghosted over an unending carpet of lights, threaded by a glowing webwork that refined itself into recursive infinity. Greater Kingston South was the ziphead name for the place. A Spider supercity. This world was cold and freezing colder, but it was no wasteland. The Spiders’ megalopolises looked almost Frenkisch. This was a real civilization, crowned by forty years of sustained progress. Its capital technology was still short of Humankind’s highest standards, but with ziphead guidance, that could be corrected in a decade or two. For forty years, I have been reduced to a Master of Tens, and soon I will be Master of Tens of Millions. And beyond that…if the Spider world really held clues to a Higher Technology…someday he and Tomas Nau would return to Frenk and Balacrea to rule there too.

  In the space of three seconds, the picture fragmented into a dozen copies, and then a dozen dozen. “What—”

  “The lander just broke into submunitions, Podmaster.” Reynolt’s explanation was cold, almost mocking. “Almost two hundred mobiles—we’ll get some into Southmost.” She turned from the display and almost looked him in the eyes. “Strange that you are suddenly so interested in operational details, Podmaster.”

  He felt a flicker of the old rage at her impudence, but it was a mild thing, not affecting his breathing, much less his vision. He gave a little shrug at the question. Nowadays I can get along even with Reynolt. Maybe Tomas Nau was right; maybe he was growing up. “I want to see what the creatures really look like.” Know your slaves. Soon they would fry Spiders by the hundred million, but somehow he must learn to tolerate those that were spared.

  The spylets arced silently downward, across a frozen strait. A few were still spinning, and Ritser had a glimpse of clouds, the topside of a—hurricane? Two hundred thumb-sized pellets. Over the next thousand seconds they all came down, many in deep snow, some on rocky wasteland. But there were successes, too.

  Several ended up on some kind of roadway, drenched in blue streetlight. One of the views showed snow-draped ruins in the distance. Heavy, closed vehicles lumbered by. Reynolt’s ziphead wiggled his spylets out onto the road. He was trying to hitch a ride. One by one, they ceased transmitting, squashed flat. Ritser glanced at an inventory window. “This better work, Anne. We only have one more multi-lander.”

  Reynolt didn’t bother to reply. Ritser pulled himself down to tap her specialist on the shoulder. “So, are you going to be able get one indoors?”

  The odds were against any answer; a Focused mind in a control loop is usually unreachable. But after a moment the zip nodded. “Probe 132 is doing well. I’ve got three hundred seconds left on the high-gain link. We’re just a few meters this side of the weather door. This one is getting in—” The fellow hunched lower over the controls. He swayed back and forth like an addict playing a hand-eye game, which in a sense was exactly the situation. One of the pictures panned up and down as he wiggled the device into traffic.

  Brughel looked back at Reynolt. “That damn time lag. How can you expect to—”

  “Running a remote like this isn’t the worst. Melin”—the ziphead operator—“has very good delayed coordinat
ion. Our main problem is operations on the Spiders’ networks. We can dredge for data, but very soon we’ll be interacting in tight real time. A ten-second turnaround is longer than some network timeouts.”

  As she spoke, a flashing tread flew past the little camera. By some magic of ziphead intuition, Melin had flipped the gadget onto the side of the vehicle. The image spun madly for several seconds as Melin synched the rotation with the view. A door opened in the wall ahead of them, and they drove on through. Thirty seconds passed. The walls seemed to slide upward. Some kind of elevator? But if the scale information were true, the room was wider than a racquetball court.

  Seconds passed, and Brughel found himself caught by the scene. For years now, everything they had gotten about the Spiders had been secondhand, from Reynolt’s ziphead translators. Some large precentage of that had to be fairy-tale crap; it was just too cute. Real pictures were what he needed. Microsat optical reconnaissance produced some pictures, but the resolution was awful. For several years, Ritser had thought that when the Spiders finally invented hi-res video, he would get a good look. But the visual physiologies were just too different. Nowadays, about five percent of all Spider military comm was this extremely hi-res stuff that Trixia Bonsol called “videomancy.” Without heavy interpretation, it was just a jumble to humans. He would have been very suspicious that it was a steganographic cover, except that the translators had proven to Kal’s snoops that it was innocent video—all quite impressive if you were a Spider.

  But now, in a very few seconds, he would get to see how the monsters looked from a human pov.

  No motion was visible. If this was an elevator, they were going down a long way. That made sense, considering what the south pole weather was like. “Are we going to lose signal?”

  Reynolt didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know. Melin’s trying to get relays into that elevator shaft. I’m more worried about it being discovered. Even if the meltdown-triggers work—”

  Brughel laughed. “Who cares? Don’t you see, Reynolt? We’re less than four days from grabbing it all.”

  “The Accord is beginning to panic. They just sacked a senior manager. I’ve got meeting logs that show Victory Smith now suspects network corruption.”

  “Their Intelligence boss?” The news stopped Brughel for a moment. This must have happened very recently. Still, “They have less than four days. What can they do?”

  Reynolt’s gaze was the usual stone thing. “They could partition their net, maybe stop using it altogether. That would stop us.”

  “And also lose them the war against the Kindred.”

  “Yes. Unless they could provide the Kindred with solid proof of ‘Monsters from Outer Space.’”

  And that was not bloody likely. The woman was obsessive. Ritser smiled at her frowning face. Of course. That’s how we made you.

  The elevator doors had opened. The camera was giving them only one frame a second now, with low resolution. Damn.

  “Yes!” That was Melin, triumphant about something.

  “He’s got a relay in place.”

  Suddenly the picture turned crisp and smooth. As the spy-let crept out from the elevator doors, Melin turned its eyes to look down an incredibly steep set of stairs, more like a ladder really. Who knew what this area was, a loading garage? For now, the little camera hid in corners and looked out upon the Spiders. From the scale bar, he could see that the monsters were of the expected size. A grown one would come up to about Brughel’s thigh. The creatures stretched far across the ground in a low posture, just as in the library pictures retrieved before Relight. They look very little like the mental picture that the ziphead translators evoked. Did they wear clothes? Not like humans. The monsters were swathed with things that looked like banners with buttons. Huge panniers hung from the sides of many of them. They moved in quick, sinister jerks, their bladelike forelegs cutting this way and that before them. There was a crowd here, chitinous black except for the mismatched colors of their clothing. Their heads glittered as with large flat gemstones. Spider eyes. And as for the Spider mouth—there the translators had used the proper word: maw. A fanged depth surround by tiny claws—was that what Bonsol & Co. called “eating hands”?—that seemed to be in constant, writhing motion.

  Massed together, the Spiders were more a nightmare than he’d imagined, the sort of things you crush and crush and crush and still more of them come at you. Ritser sucked in a breath. One comforting thought was that—if all went well—in just under four days, these particular monsters would be dead.

  For the first time in forty years, a starship would fly across the OnOff system. It would be a very short hop, less than two million kilometers, scarcely a remooring by civilized standards. It was very nearly the most that any of the surviving starships could manage.

  Jau Xin had supervised the flight prep of the Invisible Hand. The Hand had always been Ritser Brughel’s portable fiefdom, but Jau knew it was also the only starship that had not been whollys cannibalized over the years.

  In the days before their “passengers” embarked, Jau had drained the L1 distillery of hydrogen. It was just a few thousand tonnes, a droplet in the million-tonne capacity of the ramscoop’s primer tanks, but enough to slide them across the gap between L1 and the Spider world.

  Jau and Pham Trinli made a final inspection of the starship’s drive throat. It was always strange, looking at that two-meter narrowness. Here the forces of hell had burned for decades, driving the Qeng Ho vessel up to thirty-percent lightspeed. The internal surface was micrometer smooth. The only evidence of its fiery past was the fractal pattern of gold and silver that glittered in the light of their suit lamps. It was the micronet of processors behind those walls that actually guided the fields, but if the throat wall cavitated while under way, the fastest processors in the universe wouldn’t save them. True to form, Trinli made a big deal of his laser-metric inspection, then was contemptuous of the results. “There’s ninety-micron swale on the port side—but what the hell. There’s no new pitting. You could carve your name in the walls here, and it wouldn’t make any difference on this flight. What are you planning, a couple hundred Ksecs at fractional gee?”

  “Um. We’ll start with a long gentle push, but the braking burn will be a thousand seconds at a little more than one gravity.” They wouldn’t brake till they were low over open ocean. Anything else would light Arachna’s sky brighter than the sun, and be seen by every Spider on the near side of the planet.

  Trinli waved his hand in an airy gesture of dismissal. “Don’t worry about it. Many times, I’ve taken bigger chances with in-system flight.” They crawled out the bow side of the throat; the smooth surface widened into the beginnings of the forward field projectors. All the while, Trinli continued with his bogus stories. No. Most of the stories could be true, but abstracted from all the real adventurers the old man had ever known. Trinli did know something about ship drives. The tragedy was that they didn’t have anyone who knew much more. All the Qeng Ho flight engineers had been killed in the original fighting—and the pod’s last ziphead engineer had fallen to mindrot runaway.

  They emerged from the bow end of the Hand and climbed a mooring strand back to their taxi. Trinli paused and turned. “I envy you, Jau my boy. Take a look at your ship! Almost a million tonnes dry weight! You won’t be going far, but you’ll be bringing the Hand to the treasure and the Customers it sailed fifty light-years to find.”

  Jau followed his broad gesture. Over the years, Jau had realized that Trinli’s theatrics were a cover…but sometimes they reached out and plucked at your soul. The Invisible Hand looked quite starworthy, hundred meter after hundred meter of curving hull sweeping off into the distance, streamlined for speeds and environments at the limit of all human accomplishment. And beyond the stern rings—1.5 million kilometers beyond—the disk of Arachna showed pale and dim. A First Contact, and I will be the Pilot Manager. Jau should have been a proud man…

  Jau’s last day before departure was busy, filled with fi
nal checks and provisioning. There would be more than a hundred zipheads and staff. Jau didn’t learn just which specialties were represented, but it was obvious that the Podmasters wanted to manipulate the Spiders’ networks intensively, without the ten-second time delay of L1 operations. That was reasonable. Saving the Spiders from themselves would involve some incredible frauds, perhaps the taking over of entire strategic weapons systems.

  Jau was coming off his shift when Kal Omo appeared at Xin’s little office just off the Hand’s bridge.

  “One more job, Pilot Manager.” Omo’s narrow face broke into a humorless grin. “Call it overtime.”

  They took a taxi down to the rockpile, but not to Hammerfest. Around the arc of Diamond One, embedded in ice and diamond, was the entrance to L1-A. Two other taxis were already moored by the arsenal’s lock.

  “You’ve studied the Hand’s weapon fittings, Pilot Manager?”

  “Yes.” Xin had studied everything about the Hand, except Brughel’s private quarters. “But surely a Qeng Ho would be more familiar—”

  Omo shook his head. “This isn’t appropriate work for a Peddler, not even Mr. Trinli.” It took some seconds to get through the main lock security, but once inside they had a clear passage into the weapons area. Here they were confronted by the noise of fitting machines and cutters. The squat ovoids racked along the walls were marked with the weapons glyph—the ancient Qeng Ho symbol for nukes and directed-energy weapons. For years, the gossip had speculated just how much survived at L1-A. Now Jau could see for himself.