Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  She reached out to pat Nevil’s shoulder, and his hand found hers. Surely both hands were chilled, but his was the warmer. It felt so comforting. “Thank you, Nevil,” she said softly.

  He held her hand for a second more. “It’s just the support you deserve. We all need you.” Then he withdrew his hand with an embarrassed laugh. “And you’re right about the weather!” He stood and slid down from his perch on the rock, then shined a dim light on the rock to help her down. Thankfully, he did not give her a hand with the descent.

  They trudged down the mossy path, keeping a good one meter fifty between them. The rain had increased to a downpour, and the breeze had become a driving wind. The glowbugs had surrendered the night, and she imagined that the path down to Oobii must already be flowing with mud. It was a dark and stormy night! And yet, and yet … Ravna felt more comfort and optimism than she had for a very long time.

  CHAPTER 10

  Autumn around Starship Hill was beginning to show its teeth. There was still about half a day of sunlight in every day, but most days were cloudy, with ocean squalls coming and coming, each a little colder than the last. The rain was slush, then it was slush and snow. The only uglier season was the endless mud of late Spring, but that held the promise of greenery and summer. Autumn’s promise was different: the deadly cold of Arctic winter. Winter was a good time for one of Ravna’s favorite projects. In the Northern Icefangs, the tendays of night were dry and clear and less than 185°K. A space-based civilization would count that as so near room temperature as to make no difference, but Oobii had dredged up some metamaterial studies from its archives of bypassed technologies: Given a hectare at those temperatures, you could carve out macroscopic logic and then use a laser interference scheme to fabricate micron-scale semiconductor parts. Their last three attempts had been tantalizing failures. Maybe this winter would be different.…

  Of course, the project had been discussed in the Executive Council. Scrupilo was obsessed with the experiment, his Cold Valley lab. And though this third attempt was not a secret, Nevil suggested to Ravna that it was just as well not to make much of it to the Children at large. The ice experiments could be a game changer, moving the world to automation decades ahead of schedule, ending the worst of the kids’ everyday discomforts. On the other hand, this was the third try and Oobii gave it only a modest chance of success.

  Ravna obsessed right along with Scrupilo; discovering the Disaster Study Group had made the likelihood of a failure this winter all the more depressing. But now, since that evening with the glowbugs at Pham’s grave, she could settle for knowing that things were on the right path. Every day that passed, Nevil brought some new insight, often things that could not have been brought up in Council, sometimes things she would never have thought of by herself. For Nevil was the perfect complement to Johanna. Before the Oobii landed, Johanna had been alone here, surrounded by the Tines. She had become their hero. She had close friends at the highest Tinish levels, and the lowest. The packs loved her for what she had done in combat and even for the crazy breakout she had fomented at the old Fragmentarium, which had started the private hospital movement. Ravna was constantly surprised at how many Tines claimed to know her personally—even packs that were not veterans.

  But though Johanna had plenty of friends among the Children, she—and Jefri—were still somewhat apart from them; both had spent that terrible first year here alone. Nevil, on the other hand, was Ravna’s perfect bridge to the Children. He was a born leader and had known every one of the kids back at the High Lab. Nevil had their pulse; he seemed to know every quirky reason for what they might like or resent or desire.

  ─────

  “How do you like the New Meeting Place?” asked Ravna.

  “I love it!” Timor Ristling was fourteen years old now, but he still looked to be only six or seven. He walked with a limp and had a spastic tremor. Ravna was terribly afraid there were mental deficiencies, too; Timor was very good at manual arithmetic, but lagged behind in most other topics. It didn’t help that his Tinish Best Friend was a bad-tempered foursome who regarded the boy as her sinecure. Belle Ornrikak was tagging along behind them, a calculating glint in her eyes.

  But just now, Timor’s unhappy history was nearly invisible. He held her hand, all but dragging Ravna along. His tremor could have been taken as part of his joyful excitement for what Nevil’s design suggestions had made of the Oobii’s cargo bay.

  The space was forty by thirty by twenty meters. Ravna and Pham had made good use of a tiny part of it in their journey here, smuggling themselves through customs at Harmonious Repose. Now the space was almost empty, its inland side resting at ground level. A half-timbered wall had been built across the cargo hatch, enough to keep out the weather.

  Nevil had remodeled the interior, partly with local materials, partly by revising walls into explicit access points and game stations. He’d decorated everything in what he confessed was a poor imitation of the manner of Straum. Timor led Ravna across the gem-tiled floor, showing her wonder after wonder. “And see above?” The boy was staring up, wavering a little with his uncertain balance. “It’s the skyline round Straumli Main. I remember it from just before we left for the High Lab. I had friends in beginning school there.” She knew he had been about four years old when he left Straumli Main, but somehow those memories had survived everything since.

  “It’s nice, Timor.”

  “No, it’s beautiful! Thank you for building it for us.”

  “It wasn’t just me,” said Ravna. In fact, virtually none of the detail design had been her own. Most was from Nevil and his friends, but Nevil thought it best if for now she got as much credit as possible.

  Belle slipped around Ravna to stand by Timor. The pack was mostly watching the stations running hunter games, but she sounded bored: “I’ve heard this is nothing like the real Beyond; the Children will get tired of the gimmicks soon enough.”

  “No, we won’t!” responded Timor, his voice getting a little loud. “I love it here, and there’s more! I’ll show you.” He turned away, leaving Belle’s gaze still caught with an addict’s intensity on the game displays. Not until Ravna had walked past her did she recover and follow along.

  Timor took them away from the game and sports floors and up a ramp. Here, the exciting noises of the gaming area were muted by Oobii’s active acoustics. Ten or twelve of the oldest Children were sitting around a projecting display space. Maybe this was a strategy game, or— Then she noticed Nevil standing a little back from the chairs. It looked as if he had just arrived, too. She started toward him, but Timor was plucking at her sleeve. “Do you see what they’re doing?”

  There were intricate models floating in the space between the chairs and the wall. Small windows hung by each of the kids. The models looked like some kind of network thing, but—she shook her head.

  “Øvin can explain!” Timor drew her over to where Øvin Verring and Elspa Latterby were sitting together.

  Øvin looked up at her appearance. There was a flash of surprise in his face, and perhaps nervousness. “Hello, Ravna!”

  “Hei,” said Elspa, and gave a little wave.

  Ravna grinned at him. “So what are you all doing?” She looked around at the entire group. Except for Heida Øysler, these were some of the most serious of the Children. “Not a game?”

  Elspa shook her head. “Ah, no. We’re trying to learn to, um—”

  Heida took over: “Ever wonder why we kids haven’t pushed to use Oobii’s automation?”

  “A little.” In fact, most of the Children had resisted learning programming almost as much as they had more primitive skills.

  “Two reasons,” said Heida. “You seemed to want it for your projects—but just as important, this starship is as dumb as a rock.”

  “It’s the best that can exist here, Heida.”

  “I like it a lot!” put in Timor.

  Heida grinned. “Okay then, so it’s not a dumb rock; it’s more like one of those whatsits
, a flaked stone arrowhead. The point is, it’s worthless for—”

  Øvin shook his head. “What Heida is trying to say in her own gracious way is…” He thought for a second, perhaps trying to come up with something less ungracious. “… is that now that we have access beyond our classes, maybe we should learn to change our ways and make the best use of Oobii that we can. So far we’re visualizing the problem. That’s usually the hard part. Let me show you.”

  He turned and glanced at the others. Each was suddenly busy with details on his or her own display. What Ravna could see looked like art programming, but performed in some incredibly roundabout way. Elspa Latterby looked up. “Yes, all clear. Go for it, Øvin.”

  The structure forming in the space between the kids didn’t look like art. There were thousands of points of light, variously connected by colored lines.

  Will someone please explain this to me? thought Ravna. It might be a network simulation, but there was no labelling. Ah, wait, she could almost guess at the power law on the connections. Maybe this was a—

  Øvin was talking again: “This was hell to put together using Oobii’s interface, but we’ve visualized a whole-body map of the transduction network in a modern human. Well, it’s what Oobii has on file, a racial average across Sjandra Kei. We Straumers can’t be much different. Anyway—” He zoomed in on one cluster in the network. The rest of the complexity shifted to the sides, not exactly disappearing, but moving into the far distance. “This,” Øvin continued, “covers part of the motor stability region.”

  Ravna nodded back, and tried to keep a smile pasted on her face. She was beginning to guess where all this was going. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Nevil was drifting around the outer edge of the group in Ravna’s direction. Help!

  Her smile must have been encouraging, for Øvin continued with his explanation: “This is really just a test case for a much larger class of problems—namely medicine in general. If we can learn enough of Oobii’s programming interface, we can get the ship to generate pathologies on the motor stability region and compare them with the symptoms it perceives in—”

  “In me!” said Timor. The boy had settled down on the floor when Øvin began his demo, but now he struggled up to his knees, making sure that Ravna would notice. “They’re going to cure what’s wrong in me.”

  Øvin glanced down at the boy. “We’re going to try, Timor. Everything’s a crap shoot Down Here.”

  “I know.” Timor sounded irritated by the obvious caveat.

  After a second, Øvin looked back at Ravna. “Anyway, if—I mean, as soon as—we do all that, we’ll have Oobii start generating treatment targets and running experiments.” Suddenly, Øvin was more hesitant. He was looking at Ravna for some kind of approval. “We think we have something, Ravna. What do you think?”

  Ravna stared at the network sim for a moment. That was so much easier than looking into Øvin Verring’s eyes. These kids were very bright, the children of geniuses. The oldest ones, before their flight from the High Lab, had had a good Straumer education. Down Here? Down Here, the kids were relatively uneducated. Down Here, experiments didn’t run themselves, there were intermediate steps required, infrastructure to create.

  She looked back at Øvin Verring, saw that he saw through her attempt at mellowness. Her smile cracked apart, and she said, “Øvin. How can I say this? You—”

  And then rescue miraculously arrived. Nevil. He patted Øvin on the shoulder and smiled comfortingly in Ravna’s direction. “This will be okay, guys. Let me talk to Ravna.”

  The wannabe medical researchers seemed relieved—though not nearly as relieved as Ravna felt.

  Ravna gave them all her best smile. “I’ll get back to you.” She looked down. “I promise, Timor.”

  “I know you will,” said Timor.

  Then she let Nevil spirit her away. Thank goodness. He must have some control on the New Meeting Place environment, since they hadn’t gone five meters before she felt the sound quality shift and knew that even standing here in the middle of the floor, it was just the two of them who could hear each other. “Thanks, Nevil. That was awful. How did the kids come to try—”

  Nevil made an angry gesture. “It was my fault. Damn. The Meeting Place has plenty of these Slow Zone games, but I figured the best of us would want to see how what we’ve learned in the Academy could be put to work here.”

  “I think we both wanted that. I do need planning help.”

  “Yeah, but I should have guessed that they’d zero in on the impractical. We both know how crazy it would be to get diverted into heavy bioscience at this stage.”

  Ravna turned so that only Nevil would see her unhappiness. “I’ve tried to explain this to Øvin before.”

  Nevil shook his head. “I know. Øvin … he can be a little unrealistic. He thinks this is as easy as improving harvest yields. You need to sit everybody down together and—”

  “Right, my speech.” More and more, that looked essential. “And the sooner the better.” Get everybody together, explain the problem and ask for their support. “I could ask for formal procedures for handling medical emergencies, how we might use the remaining sleep caskets till we have proper medicine.”

  “Yes!”

  “I should go back, tell Øvin and the others and try to explain.” She looked over his shoulder at where the amateur Oobii managers were still clustered around their network simulation. Except for Timor, none of them were quite looking in her direction.

  Nevil seemed to notice the indecision in her face. “If you want, I can explain to Øvin and the others. I mean, the general idea—and how you’re still working out the details.”

  “Would you?” These all were Nevil’s friends. He understood them in a way that Ravna never could. “Oh, thank you, Nevil.”

  He waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  Ravna stepped out of their bubble of audio privacy. As Nevil turned to go back to Øvin and the others, she gave them a little wave. Then she was off to the exit leading up the bridge. There was so much she had to get right for this speech, for making it something that everyone—including Woodcarver—could get behind.

  ─────

  A full tenday quickly passed. Outside, the snow now stayed on the ground, even on the streets of Hidden Island. There was more twilight and true night. The moon and the aurora were coming to dominate the sky.

  Except for a trip with Scrupilo to Smeltertop and Cold Valley, Ravna spent most of her time indoors, on Oobii’s command deck. There was so much to do. Up north, the bottom of Cold Valley had been planed smooth. Scrupilo’s packs were nearly done with carving a thousand square meter design; two of Oobii’s micro lasers were already on site. Come the truly cold weather, they planned on fabbing their first hundred-micron-scale components … ten thousand adder circuits. Ta-dah! Really! It was a silly goal, but a major proof of principle. The previous winter they hadn’t quite reached that point when spring arrived.

  Her work on the speech was coming along, hopefully a masterpiece of realistic optimism. Every day, Nevil came to her with way too many details of what they were doing with New Meeting Place. The speech and the New Meeting Place would work together. And she’d set the date for the speech. She was committed. It felt good!

  There was only one full Executive Council meeting in that time; Woodcarver was in an ugly mood again. Scrupilo, too, was being a pain. He was the most politically ignorant fellow Ravna had ever met—an amazing thing considering his parentage. Even though he got most of Ravna’s attention and most of Oobii’s support, he was still complaining about her lack of attention for the Cold Valley fab. He was right—if you ignored the political necessity of assuring support in the future. Nevertheless, she gave Scrupilo extra time and attention, letting Nevil handle more of the event details.

  There were other reasons for not having more Council meetings. Ravna had reviewed the early years of her Flenser surveillance; she was still certain the camera infestation had b
een accurate for the first few years. That and the patent absurdities of the most recent session made it very foolish to get paranoid about Flenser. And yet she was still a bit uncomfortable about seeing him at a Council meeting.

  And finally, Pilgrim and Johanna were out of town, on what Ravna considered a dangerous and unnecessary adventure. The two had taken the agrav flier and were snooping around East Home, five thousand kilometers away. That was beyond direct radio range, but they’d reset one of Oobii’s few remaining commsets to transmit in the five-to-twenty-megahertz range. They splattered their radio emissions off the sky and let the planet’s ionosphere reflect them across the continent. On Starship Hill, Oobii was clever enough to pick out the signal even when the aurora hung its brightest curtains above the Domain—and to blast a much stronger response signal back to Johanna’s commset.

  The one full Council meeting had been mainly about that expedition:

  “I’m glad we flew out here,” came Pilgrim’s voice. “The stories about Tycoon haven’t been exaggerated. He really has started his own industrial revolution.”

  Flenser looked up from his accustomed place at the far end of the table. “Aha! Vendacious shows his claws!”

  Woodcarver gave a little hiss, but didn’t otherwise respond. In fact, East Home was the only place there had been sure sightings of the misbegotten Vendacious. That had been eight years ago, shortly before a series of major disappearances from Scrupilo’s labs: printers, a telephone prototype, even one of the three printer interfaces. At the time, the thefts had been an even bigger scandal than the recent radio cloak theft, though two of the burglars had been caught—both former lieutenants of Vendacious. Since those thefts, Tycoon had been a steady source of “innovation.”

  “We’ve talked about this before,” said Ravna. “Tycoon may regard himself as our rival, but any diffusion of technology will just speed up our overall progress. Keep in mind the main threat.” The Blighter fleet coming down upon us.

  Flenser eyed himself slyly—a packish smirk. “The main threat won’t matter if you get the Domain murdered beforehand.”