by Vernor Vinge
He followed her up the passage that stretched straight and gently rising as far as the torchlight shone. They were walking a path that could not be—or at least that no one in the Coven could have believed. The castle was basically a logical structure “fleshed” out with the sensory cues that allowed the warlocks to move about it as one would a physical structure. Its moats and walls were part of that logical structure, and though they had no physical reality outside of the varying potentials in whatever processors were running the program, they were proof against the movement of the equally “unreal” perceptions of the inhabitants of the plane. Erythrina and Mr. Slippery could have escaped the deep room simply by falling back into the real world, but in doing so, they would have left a chain of unclosed processor links. Their departure would have been detected by every Coven member, even by Alan, even by the sprites. An orderly departure scheme, such as represented by this tunnel, could only mean that Erythrina was far too clever to need his help, or that she had been one of the original builders of the castle some four years earlier (lost in the Mists of Time, as the Limey put it).
They were wild dogs now, large enough so as not likely to be bothered, small enough to be mistaken for the amateur users that are seen more and more in the Other Plane as the price of Portals declines and the skill of the public increases. Mr. Slippery followed Erythrina down narrow paths, deeper and deeper into the swamp that represented commercial and government data space. Occasionally he was aware of sprites or simulators watching them with hostile eyes from nests off to the sides of the trail. These were idle creations in many cases—program units designed to infuriate or amuse later visitors to the plane. But many of them guarded information caches, or peep-holes into other folks’ affairs, or meeting places of other SIGs. The Coven might be the most sophisticated group of users on this plane, but they were far from being alone.
The brush got taller, bending over the trail to drip on their backs. But the water was clear here, spread in quiet ponds on either side of their path. Light came from the water itself, a pearly luminescence that shone upward on the trunks of the waterbound trees and sparkled faintly in the droplets of water in their moss and leaves. That light was the representation of the really huge data bases run by the government and the largest companies. It did not correspond to a specific geographical location, but rather to the main East/West net that stretches through selected installations from Honolulu to Oxford, taking advantage of the time zones to spread the user load.
“Just a little bit farther,” Erythrina said over her shoulder, speaking in the beast language (encipherment) that they had chosen with their forms.
Minutes later, they shrank into the brush, out of the way of two armored hackers that proceeded implacably up the trail. The pair drove in single file, the impossibly large eight-cylinder engines on their bikes belching fire and smoke and noise. The one bringing up the rear carried an old-style recoilless rifle decorated with swastikas and chrome. Dim fires glowed through their blackened face plates. The two dogs eyed the bikers timidly, as befitted their present disguise, but Mr. Slippery had the feeling he was looking at a couple of amateurs who were imaging beyond their station in life: the bikes’ tires didn’t always touch the ground, and the tracks they left didn’t quite match the texture of the muck. Anyone could put on a heroic image in this plane, or appear as some dreadful monster. The problem was that there were always skilled users who were willing to cut such pretenders down to size—perhaps even to destroy their access. It befitted the less experienced to appear small and inconspicuous, and to stay out of others’ way.
(Mr. Slippery had often speculated just how the simple notion of using high-resolution EEGs as input/output devices had caused the development of the “magical world” representation of data space. The Limey and Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols. It was, they argued, just more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment. They had a point; in fact, it was likely that the governments of the world hadn’t caught up to the skills of the better warlocks simply because they refused to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy. Mr. Slippery looked down at the reflection in the pool beside him and saw the huge canine face and lolling tongue looking up at him; he winked at the image. He knew that despite all his friends’ high intellectual arguments, there was another reason for the present state of affairs, a reason that went back to the Moon Lander and Adventure games at the “dawn of time”: it was simply a hell of a lot of fun to live in a world as malleable as the human imagination.)
Once the riders were out of sight, Erythrina moved back across the path to the edge of the pond and peered long and hard down between the lilies, into the limpid depths. “Okay, let’s do some cross-correlation. You take the JPL data base, and I’ll take the Harvard Multispectral Patrol. Start with data coming off space probes out to ten AUs. I have a suspicion the easiest way for the Mailman to disguise his transmissions is to play trojan horse with data from a NASA spacecraft.”
Mr. Slippery nodded. One way or another, they should resolve her alien invasion theory first.
“It should take me about half an hour to get in place. After that, we can set up for the correlation. Hmmm…if something goes wrong, let’s agree to meet at Mass Transmit 3,” and she gave a password scheme. Clearly that would be an emergency situation. If they weren’t back in the castle within three or four hours, the others would certainly guess the existence of her secret exit.
Erythrina tensed, then dived into the water. There was a small splash, and the lilies bobbed gently in the expanding ring waves. Mr. Slippery looked deep, but as expected, there was no further sign of her. He padded around the side of the pool, trying to identify the special glow of the JPL data base.
There was thrashing near one of the larger lilies, one that he recognized as obscuring the NSA connections with the East/West net. A large bullfrog scrambled out of the water onto the pad and turned to look at him. “Aha! Gotcha, you sonofabitch!”
It was Virginia; the voice was the same, even if the body was different. “Shhhhhh!” said Mr. Slippery, and looked wildly about for signs of eavesdroppers. There were none, but that did not mean they were safe. He spread his best privacy spell over her and crawled to the point closest to the lily. They sat glaring at each other like some characters out of La Fontaine: The Tale of the Frog and Dog. How dearly he would love to leap across the water and bite off that fat little head. Unfortunately the victory would be a bit temporary. “How did you find me?” Mr. Slippery growled. If people as inexperienced as the Feds could trace him down in his disguise, he was hardly safe from the Mailman.
“You forget,” the frog puffed smugly. “We know your Name. It’s simple to monitor your home processor and follow your every move.”
Mr. Slippery whined deep in his throat. In thrall to a frog. Even Wiley has done better than that. “Okay, so you found me. Now what do you want?”
“To let you know that we want results, and to get a progress report.”
He lowered his muzzle till his eyes were even with Virginia’s. “Heh heh. I’ll give you a progress report, but you’re not going to like it.” And he proceeded to explain Erythrina’s theory that the Mailman was an alien invasion.
“Rubbish,” spoke the frog afterward. “Sheer fantasy! You’re going to have to do better than that, Pol—er, Mister.”
He shuddered. She had almost spoken his Name. Was that a calculated threat or was she simply as stupid as she seemed? Nevertheless, he persisted. “Well then, what about Venezuela?” He related the evidence Ery had that the coup in that country was the Mailman’s work.
This time the frog did not reply. Its eyes glazed over with apparent shock, and he realized that Virginia must be consulting people at the other end. Almost fifteen minutes passed. When the frog’s eyes cleare
d, it was much more subdued. “We’ll check on that one. What you say is possible. Just barely possible. If true…well, if it’s true, this is the biggest threat we’ve had to face this century.”
And you see that I am perhaps the only one who can bail you out. Mr. Slippery relaxed slightly. If they only realized it, they were thralled to him as much as the reverse—at least for the moment. Then he remembered Erythrina’s plan to grab as much power as they could for a brief time and try to use that advantage to flush the Mailman out. With the Feds on their side, they could do more than Ery had ever imagined. He said as much to Virginia.
The frog croaked, “You…want…us…to give you carte blanche in the Federal data system? Maybe you’d like to be President and Chair of the JCS, to boot?”
“Hey, that’s not what I said. I know it’s an extraordinary suggestion, but this is an extraordinary situation. And in any case, you know my Name. There’s no way I can get around that.”
The frog went glassy-eyed again, but this time for only a couple of minutes. “We’ll get back to you on that. We’ve got a lot of checking to do on the rest of your theories before we commit ourselves to anything. Till further notice, though, you’re grounded.”
“Wait!” What would Ery do when he didn’t show? If he wasn’t back in the castle in three or four hours, the others would surely know about the secret exit.
The frog was implacable. “I said, you’re grounded, Mister. We want you back in the real world immediately. And you’ll stay grounded till you hear from us. Got it?”
The dog slumped. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” The frog clambered heavily to the edge of the sagging lily and dumped itself ungracefully into the water. After a few seconds, Mr. Slippery followed.
Coming back was much like waking from a deep daydream; only here it was the middle of the night.
Roger Pollack stood, stretching, trying to get the kinks out of his muscles. Almost four hours he had been gone, longer than ever before. Normally his concentration began to fail after two or three hours. Since he didn’t like the thought of drugging up, this put a definite limit on his endurance in the Other Plane.
Beyond the bungalow’s picture window, the pines stood silhouetted against the Milky Way. He cranked open a pane and listened to the night birds trilling out there in the trees. It was near the end of spring; he liked to imagine he could see dim polar twilight to the north. More likely it was just Crescent City. Pollack leaned close to the window and looked high into the sky, where Mars sat close to Jupiter. It was hard to think of a threat to his own life from as far away as that.
Pollack backed up the spells acquired during this last session, powered down his system, and stumbled off to bed.
The following morning and afternoon seemed the longest of Roger Pollack’s life. How would they get in touch with him? Another visit of goons and black Lincolns? What had Erythrina done when he didn’t make contact? Was she all right?
And there was just no way of checking. He paced back and forth across his tiny living room, the novel-plots that were his normal work forgotten. Ah, but there is a way. He looked at his old data set with dawning recognition. Virginia had said to stay out of the Other Plane. But how could they object to his using a simple data set, no more efficient than millions used by office workers all over the world?
He sat down at the set, scraped the dust from the handpads and screen. He awkwardly entered long-unused call symbols and watched the flow of news across the screen. A few queries and he discovered that no great disasters had occurred overnight, that the insurgency in Indonesia seemed temporarily abated. (Wiley J. was not to be king just yet.) There were no reports of big-time data vandals biting the dust.
Pollack grunted. He had forgotten how tedious it was to see the world through a data set, even with audio entry. In the Other Plane, he could pick up this sort of information in seconds, as casually as an ordinary mortal might glance out the window to see if it is raining. He dumped the last twenty-four hours of the world bulletin board into his home memory space and began checking through it. The bulletin board was ideal for untraceable reception of messages: anyone on Earth could leave a message—indexed by subject, target audience, and source. If a user copied the entire board, and then searched it, there was no outside record of exactly what information he was interested in. There were also simple ways to make nearly untraceable entries on the board.
As usual, there were about a dozen messages for Mr. Slippery. Most of them were from fans; the Coven had greater notoriety than any other vandal SIG. A few were for other Mr. Slipperys. With five billion people in the world, that wasn’t surprising.
And one of the memos was from the Mailman; that’s what it said in the source field. Pollack punched the message up on the screen. It was in caps, with no color or sound. Like all messages directly from the Mailman, it looked as if it came off some incredibly ancient I/O device:
YOU COULD HAVE BEEN RICH. YOU COULD HAVE RULED. INSTEAD YOU CONSPIRED AGAINST ME. I KNOW ABOUT THE SECRET EXIT. I KNOW ABOUT YOUR DOGGY DEPARTURE. YOU AND THE RED ONE ARE DEAD NOW. IF YOU EVER SNEAK BACK ONTO THIS PLANE, IT WILL BE THE TRUE DEATH—I AM THAT CLOSE TO KNOWING YOUR NAMES.
*****WATCH FOR ME IN THE NEWS,
SUCKER*********
Bluff, thought Roger. He wouldn’t be sending out warnings if he has that kind of power. Still, there was a dropping sensation in his stomach. The Mailman shouldn’t have known about the dog disguise. Was he onto Mr. Slippery’s connection with the Feds? If so, he might really be able to find Slippery’s True Name. And what sort of danger was Ery in? What had she done when he missed the rendezvous at Mass Transmit 3?
A quick search showed no messages from Erythrina. Either she was looking for him in the Other Plane, or she was as thoroughly grounded as he.
He was still stewing on this when the phone rang. He said, “Accept, no video send.” His data set cleared to an even gray: the caller was not sending video either.
“You’re still there? Good.” It was Virginia. Her voice sounded a bit odd, subdued and tense. Perhaps it was just the effect of the scrambling algorithms. He prayed she would not trust that scrambling. He had never bothered to make his phone any more secure than average. (And he had seen the schemes Wiley J. and Robin Hood had devised to decrypt thousands of commercial phone messages in real-time and monitor for key phrases, signaling them when anything interesting was detected. They couldn’t use the technique very effectively, since it took an enormous amount of processor space, but the Mailman was probably not so limited.)
Virginia continued, “No names, okay? We checked out what you told us and…it looks like you’re right. We can’t be sure about your theory about his origin, but what you said about the international situation was verified.” So the Venezuela coup had been an outside take-over. “Furthermore, we think he has infiltrated us much more than we thought. It may be that the evidence we had of unsuccessful meddling was just a red herring.” Pollack recognized the fear in her voice now. Apparently the Feds saw that they were up against something catastrophic. They were caught with their countermeasures down, and their only hope lay with unreliables like Pollack.
“Anyway, we’re going ahead with what you suggested. We’ll provide you two with the resources you requested. We want you in the Other…place as soon as possible. We can talk more there.”
“I’m on my way. I’ll check with my friend and get back to you there.” He cut the connection without waiting for a reply. Pollack sat back, trying to savor this triumph and the near-pleading in the cop’s voice. Somehow, he couldn’t. He knew what a hard case she was; anything that could make her crawl was more hellish than anything he wanted to face.
His first stop was Mass Transmit 3. Physically, MT3 was a two-thousand-tonne satellite in synchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean. The Mass Transmits handled most of the planet’s noninteractive communications (and in fact that included a lot of transmission that most people regarded as interactive—such as human/human and the simple
r human/computer conversations). Bandwidth and processor space was cheaper on the Mass Transmits because of the 240- to 900-millisecond time delays that were involved.
As such, it was a nice out-of-the-way meeting place, and in the Other Plane it was represented as a five-meter-wide ledge near the top of a mountain that rose from the forests and swamps that stood for the lower satellite layer and the ground-based nets. In the distance were two similar peaks, clear in pale sky.
Mr. Slippery leaned out into the chill breeze that swept the face of the mountain and looked down past the timberline, past the evergreen forests. Through the unnatural mists that blanketed those realms, he thought he could see the Coven’s castle.
Perhaps he should go there, or down to the swamps. There was no sign of Erythrina. Only sprites in the forms of bats and tiny griffins were to be seen here. They sailed back and forth over him, sometimes soaring far higher, toward the uttermost peak itself.
Mr. Slippery himself was in an extravagant winged man form, one that subtly projected amateurism, one that he hoped would pass the inspection of the enemy’s eyes and ears. He fluttered clumsily across the ledge toward a small cave that provided some shelter from the whistling wind. Fine, wind-dropped snow lay in a small bank before the entrance. The insects he found in the cave were no more than what they seemed—amateur transponders.
He turned and started back toward the drop-off; he was going to have to face this alone. But as he passed the snowbank, the wind swirled it up and tiny crystals stung his face and hands and nose. Trap! He jumped backward, his fastest escape spell coming to his lips, at the same time cursing himself for not establishing the spell before. The time delay was just too long; the trap lived here at MT3 and could react faster than he. The little snow-devil dragged the crystals up into a swirling column of singing motes that chimed in near-unison, “W-w-wait-t-t!”