by Vernor Vinge
Smith hesitated, certainly looking for some complaint in his words. “…Junior enlisted a year ago.”
That he had heard. It had been so long since he had seen Little Victory. He wondered how she would like the military. She had always seemed a tough little cobblie, but with a piece of Sherkaner’s whimsy. He wondered if Rhapsa and Little Hrunk might still be around.
The stairs emerged from the crater wall. This part of the residence presumably had existed in the early part of the Waning Years. But where before there had been open courts and patios, now triple-paned quartz stood strong against the Dark. It dimmed all the far colors, but the view was naked and stark. The city lights glittered across the bottomland, circling the heat-red lake at the center. A cold fog hung in the air above the water. It glowed dimly with all the light from below. The General pulled the shades on the view as they ascended toward what must have been the original owner’s high perch.
She waved him into a large, brightly lit room.
“Hrunk!” Sherkaner Underhill emerged from the overstuffed pillows that were the room’s furniture. Surely these were furnishings of the original owner. Unnerby couldn’t imagine either the General or Underhill choosing such ornaments.
Underhill trotted awkwardly across the room, his enthusiasm overmatching his agility. He had a large guide-bug on a leash, and the creature corrected his course, patiently bringing him toward the entrance. “You’ve missed Rhapsa and Little Hrunk by a couple of days, I’m afraid. Those two aren’t the cobblies you remember; they’re seventeen years old now! But the General didn’t approve of the atmosphere around here, and she shipped them back to Princeton.”
Behind himself, Hrunkner saw the General glower at her husband, but she made no comment. Instead she walked slowly from window to window, pulling the blinds, shutting out the Dark. At one time, this room had been an open gazebo; now there were a lot of windows. They settled themselves. Sherkaner was full of news about the children. The General sat in silence. As Sherk launched into Jirlib and Brent’s latest adventures, she said, “I’m sure the Sergeant isn’t that interested in hearing about our children.”
“Oh, but I—” Unnerby began, then saw the tenseness in the General’s aspect. “But I guess we have much else to talk about, don’t we?”
Sherk hesitated, then leaned forward to stroke his guide-bug’s carapace fur. The creature was large, must have weighed seventy pounds, but it looked gentle and smart. After a moment, the bug began purring. “I wish the rest of you were as easy to please as Mobiy here. But yes, we do have a lot to talk about.” He reached under a filigreed table—the thing looked like a Treppen-dynasty original, something that had survived four passages through the deepnesses of some rich family—and pulled out one of the plastic bags that Hrunk had brought from High Equatoria. He set it on the table with a thump. Wisps of rock flour spread across the polished wood.
“I boggle, Hrunk! Your magic rock dust! What put you on to this? You make one little detour—and bag a secret that all our external intelligence had totally missed.”
“Wait, wait. You make it sound like somebody fell down on the job.” Some people might look very bad unless he set things straight. “This was outside channels, but Rachner Thract cooperated with me one hundred percent. He loaned me the two cobbers that I came in with. More important, it was his agents at High Equatoria—you know the story?” Four of Thract’s people had trekked across the altiplano, brought back that rock flour from the Kindred’s inner refinery.
Smith nodded. “Yes. Don’t worry, I blame myself for missing this. We’ve gotten too confident with all our technical superiority.”
Sherkaner was chuckling. “Quite so.” He poked around in the rock flour. The lights in here were bright and full-color, much better than down in airport customs. But even in good light, the powder looked like nothing more than shale-colored dust—upland equatorial shale, if one were well-trained in mineralogy. “But I still don’t see how you came upon this—even as a possibility.”
Unnerby leaned back. Actually, the pillows felt pretty good compared with third-class passenger webbing. “Well, you remember, about five years ago, that joint Kindred-Accord expedition to the center of the altiplano? They had a couple of physicists who claimed gravity was screwball there.”
“Yes. They thought the mine shafts there would be a good place to establish a new lower boundary for the equivalence principle; instead they found big differences, which depended on the time of day. As you say, they got screwball answers, but they retracted the whole thing after they recalibrated.”
“That’s the story—but when I was putting in the power plant for West Undergate, I ran into one of the Accord physicists from that expedition. Triga Deepdug is a solid engineer, even if she is a physicist; I got to know her pretty well. Anyway, she claimed that the experimental method on that first expedition was fine, and that she was squeezed out of later participation…So I began to wonder about that huge open-pit mining operation the Kindred started on the altiplano just a year after the expedition. That’s almost centered on the physics site—and they had to build five hundred miles of rail to serve it.”
“They found copper,” said Smith. “A good strike, and that’s no lie.”
Unnerby smiled at her. “Of course. Anything less and you would have tumbled to it right away. But still…the copper mine is a marginal operation. And my physicist friend knows her business. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be nice to see what’s going on there.” He waved at the bag of rock powder. “What you see there is from their third-level refining. The Kindredian miners had to go through several hundred tons of Equatoria shale to filter out this little packet. My guess is they filter it another hundredfold before they get their final product.”
Smith nodded. “And I’ll wager that is kept in harder vaults than the Tiefer holy gemstones.”
“Sure. Thract’s team didn’t come close to the final product.” Hrunkner tapped at the rock powder with the tip of one hand. “I hope this is enough that you can prove we found something.”
“Oh, it is. It is!”
Unnerby stared at Sherk in surprise. “You’ve had it hardly four hours!”
“You know me, Hrunk. This may be a vacation resort, but I’ve got my hobbies.” And a laboratory to pursue them, no doubt. “Under proper lighting, your rock flour weighs almost half a percent less than otherwise…Congratulations, Sergeant, you’ve discovered antigravity.”
“I—” Triga Deepdug had been so sure, but until now Unnerby hadn’t really believed. “Okay, Mister Instant Analysis, how does it work?”
“Beats me!” Sherk was practically vibrating with glee. “You’ve found something genuinely new. Why, not even the…” He seemed to be searching for words, then settled for: “But it’s a subtle thing. I ground a sample of the dust even finer—and you know, nothing floats off the top; you can’t distill the ‘antigravity fraction.’ I think we’re seeing some kind of group effect. My lab here isn’t up to doing more. I’m going to fly back to Princeton with this first thing tomorrow. Besides its magic weight, there’s only one strange thing I’ve found. These upland shales always have some diamond foram content, but in this stuff the smallest forams—the millionth-inch hexens—are enriched by a factor of a thousand. I want to look for evidence of classical fields in the dust. Maybe these foram particles mediate something. Maybe—” And Sherkaner Underhill was off into a dozen speculations, and plans for a dozen dozen tests to extract the truth from those speculations. As he talked, the years seemed to fall away from him. He still had the tremor, but all his hands had come away from his guide-bug’s leash, and his voice was full of joy. It was the enthusiasm that had pushed his students and Unnerby and Victory Smith to make a new world. As he spoke, Victory rose from her perch and came over to sit close beside him. She draped her right arms across his shoulders and gave him a sharp, rippling hug.
Unnerby felt himself grinning back at Sherkaner, captured by the other’s words. “Rememb
er all the trouble you got into on the children’s radio hour? Saying ‘all the sky can be our deepness’? By God, Sherk, with this stuff, who needs rockets? We can hoist real ships into space. We can finally find out what caused those lights we saw in the Dark! Maybe we can even find other worlds out there.”
“Yes, but—” Sherkaner began, but suddenly weaker, almost as if getting manic enthusiasm reflected back on him made him realize all the problems that stood between dream and reality. “But, um, we still have Honored Pedure and the Kindred to contend with.”
Hrunkner remembered his walk through the bottom forest. And we still have to learn to live in the Dark.
The years seemed to come back down upon Sherkaner. He reached out to pet Mobiy, and set two other hands on the animal’s leash. “Yes, there are so many problems.” He shrugged, as if acknowledging his age and the distance to his dreams. “But I can’t do anything more to save the world till I get to Princeton. This evening is my best chance in a while to see how crowds react to the Dark. What did you think of our First Day of the Dark, Hrunk?”
Down from the heights of hope, head to head with the limitations of Spiderkind. “It was—scary, Sherk. We’ve given up all the rules one by one, and I saw what’s left down there this afternoon. Even—even if we win against Pedure, I’m not sure what we’ll be left with.”
The old grin wavered across Sherkaner’s aspect. “It’s not that bad, Hrunk.” He came slowly to his feet and Mobiy guided him toward the door. “Most folks left in Calorica are foolish old-money rich…you have to expect a little dissipation. But there’s still something to be learned by watching them.” He waved at the General. “I’m going to take a walk around the bottom of the ringwall, my dear. These young folks may have some interesting insights.”
Smith came off her pillows, walked around Mobiy to give her husband a little hug. “You’ll take the usual security team? No tricks?”
“Of course.” And Hrunkner had the feeling her request was deadly serious, that since twelve years ago Sherkaner and all the Underhill children were very good about accepting protection.
The jade doors closed softly behind Sherkaner, and Unnerby and the General were alone. Smith returned to her perch, and the silence stretched long. How many years had it been since he had talked to the General in person without a roomful of staff around? They exchanged electronic mail constantly. Unnerby wasn’t officially on Smith’s staff, but the fission-plant program was the single most important civilian part of her plan, and he took her advice as his command, moving from city to city according to her schedule, doing his best to build to her specs and her deadlines—and still keep the commercial contractors happy. Almost every day, Unnerby was on the phone to her staff. Several times a year they met at staff meetings.
Since the kidnappings…the barrier between them had been a fortress wall. The barrier had existed before that, growing year by year as her children grew; but before Gokna’s death, they could always reach over it. Now, it felt very strange to be sitting here alone with the General.
The silence stretched on, the two of them staring at each other and pretending not to. The air was stale and cold, as if the room had been shut for a long time. Hrunkner forced his attention to wander across the baroque tables and cabinets, all painted with a dozen colored varnishes. Practically every piece of woodwork looked a couple of generations old. Even the pillows and their embroidered fabric were in the overdone style of the Generation 58. Yet he could tell that Sherk really worked here. The perch on his right was by a desk littered with gadgets and papers. He recognized Underhill’s shaky penmanship in one title: “Videomancy for High Payload Steganography.”
Abruptly, the General broke the tense silence. “You did well, Sergeant.” She stood, and walked across the room to sit closer to him, on the perch in front of Sherk’s desk. “We had totally missed what the Kindred had discovered here. And we’d still be clueless if you hadn’t brought the matter up with Thract.”
“Rachner set up the operation, ma’am. He’s turned out to be a good officer.”
“Yes…I’d appreciate it if you’d let me do any follow-up on this with him.”
“Sure.” Need to know and all that.
And then there was more silence with nothing to say. Finally, Hrunkner waved at the absurd pillow furniture, the smallest worth a sergeant’s yearly salary. Except for Sherk’s desk, there was not a sign of either of his friends in this place. “You don’t come here often, do you?”
“No,” she said shortly. “Sherk wanted to see how people live after the Dark—and this is as near as we could get to it before we all do it ourselves. Besides, it seemed like a safe place to bring our youngest.” She looked at him defiantly.
How not to make an argument out of this? “Yes, well I’m glad you sent them home to Princeton. They’re…they’re good cobblies, ma’am, but this is not a good place for them. I had the strangest feeling down there on the bottom. The people were afraid, like the old stories about folks who don’t plan and then are left alone in the Dark. They don’t have any goal, and now it’s Dark.”
Smith sat a little lower on her perch. “We’ve got millions of years of evolution to battle; sometimes that’s harder to deal with than nuclear physics and the Honored Pedure. But people will get used to it.”
That was what Sherkaner Underhill would have said, all smiling and oblivious of the uneasiness around him. But Smith sounded more like a trooper in a hole, repeating the High Command’s assurances about enemy weakness. Suddenly he remembered how thoroughly she had shuttered every one of the windows. “You feel the same as I do about it, don’t you?”
For a moment he thought she would blow up. Instead, she sat inscrutably silent. Finally, “…You’re right, Sergeant. As I said, there’s a lot of instinct we’re running up against.” She shrugged. “Somehow, it doesn’t bother Sherkaner at all. Or rather, he knows the fear and it fascinates him, just another wonderful puzzle. Every day he goes down to the crater bottom and watches. He even mingles, bodyguards and guide-bug and all—you have to see it to believe it. He would have been down there all today if you hadn’t shown up with your own kind of fascinating puzzle.”
Unnerby smiled. “That’s Sherk for you.” Maybe he was on a safe topic. “Did you see how he lit up when we talked about my ‘magic rock dust’? I can’t wait to see what he does with it. What happens when you give a miracle to a miracle worker?”
Smith seemed to search for words. “We’ll figure out the rock dust, that’s certain. Eventually. But…hell, Hrunkner, you deserve to know. You’ve been with Sherk as long as I have. You noticed how his tremor is getting worse? The truth is, he’s not aging as well as most in your generation.”
“I noticed he’s frail, but look at all the results coming out of Princeton these days. He’s doing more than ever.”
“Yes. Indirectly. Over the years, he’s brought together a larger and larger circle of genius students. There are hundreds of them now, scattered all over the computer net.”
“…But all those papers by ‘Tom Lurksalot’? I thought that was Sherk and his students being coy.”
“That? No. That’s…that’s only his students being coy. They play anonymous games on the net; they make credit-taking into a guessing game. It’s just…silliness.”
Silly or not, it was amazingly productive. Over the last few years, “Tom Lurksalot” had provided breakthrough insights about everything from nucleonics to computer science to industrial standards. “It’s hard to believe. Just now, he seemed the same as always—mentally, I mean. The ideas seemed to come as fast as ever.” A dozen weird ideas a minute, when he’s on a roll. Unnerby smiled to himself, remembering. Flightiness, thy name is Underhill.
The General sighed, and her voice was soft and distant. She might have been talking about made-up storybook characters, not her own personal tragedy. “Sherk has had thousands of crazy ideas and hundreds of beautiful winners. But that’s…changed. My dear Sherkaner hasn’t come up with anything new in
three years. He’s into videomancy these days, did you know that? He has all his old flamboyance, but…” Smith’s voice guttered into silence.
For almost forty years, Victory Smith and Sherkaner Underhill had been a team, Underhill producing an endless avalanche of ideas and Smith selecting the best and feeding them back to him. Sherk used to describe the process more colorfully, back when he thought artificial intelligence was the wave of the future: “I’m the idea-generating component and Victory is the crap-detector; we’re an intelligence greater than anything on ten legs.” These two had transformed the world.
But now…what if half the team had lost its genius? Sherk’s brilliant whimsy had kept the General on track as much as the reverse. Without Sherk, Victory Smith was left with her own assets: courage, strength, persistence. Was that enough?
Victory didn’t say anything more for a time. And Hrunkner wished that he could walk over and put his arms across her shoulders…but sergeants, even old sergeants, don’t do that to generals.
FORTY-TWO
The years had passed, and the danger had grown. More implacably than any human Pham had ever known, Reynolt kept searching and searching. As far as possible, he had avoided manipulating the zipheads. He had even arranged for his operations to continue while he was off-Watch; that was very risky, but it evaded the obvious correlations. It didn’t help. Now Reynolt seemed to have concrete suspicions. Pham’s tracers showed her searches intensifying, closing in on her suspect—most likely Pham Nuwen. There was no cure for it. However risky the operation, Anne must be eliminated. The open house for Nau’s new “office” might be the best chance Pham would get.
“North Paw” was what Tomas Nau called it. Most everybody else—certainly the Qeng Ho who did the engineering—called it simply the Lake Park. Now everyone on-Watch had their one opportunity to see the final result.