by Vernor Vinge
A soldier climbed to the aircraft’s mid-hatch. It cracked open, and…the embassy rent-a-camera feed went dead, replaced by the King’s seal.
There was startled laughter, then applause and hooting. “Good for the General!” someone shouted. As much as anyone, these cobbers wanted to know what was happening at Southmost, but they also had a long-standing dislike for the news companies. They regarded these latest, very open discussions as a personal affront.
She looked at her team members. Most had been watching the television, but without great interest. They already knew what was going on, and—as Senior Sergeant Loudmouth had speculated—they expected to see action themselves very soon. Unfortunately, the television couldn’t help them with that. At the back of the room, far from the fizzbar and the television, a few hard-core gamers hung around their arcade boxes. That included three of Lighthill’s people. Brent had been there since they began to loiter. Her brother was hunched down under a custom game display, the helmet covering most of his head. To look at him, you’d never guess that the world was teetering on the edge of destruction.
Viki slipped off her perch and walked quietly back toward the arcade machines.
In all its thirty-five-year existence, this was the booze parlor’s finest moment. But, who knows, maybe after this we’ll carry on, turn into a real business. Stranger things had happened. Benny’s parlor had been the social center of their strange community at L1. Very soon that community would include another race, the first high-tech alien race Humankind had ever met. The parlor might well be the centerpiece of the marvelous combination.
Benny Wen floated from table to table, directing his helpers, greeting customers. Yet still occasionally his attention was off in a fabulous future, trying to imagine what it would be like to cater to Spiders.
“The bottom wing is out of brew, Benny.” Hunte’s voice came in his ear.
“Ask Gonle, Papa. She promised she’d cover whatever is needed.” He looked around, caught a glimpse of Fong down a tunnel of flowers and vines, over in the east wing of the parlor.
Benny didn’t hear his father’s reply. He was already talking to the party of Emergents and Qeng Ho that floated down around the just-prepped table. “Welcome, welcome. Lara! I haven’t seen you in so many Watches.” Pride at showing off the parlor and pleasure at meeting old friends mixed all together, warming him.
After a moment’s chat he drifted away from the table, to the next, and the next, all the time keeping track of the overall service situation. Even with Gonle and Papa both on duty, they were just barely keeping their helpers coordinated.
“She’s here, Benny.” Gonle’s voice sounded in his ear.
“She came!” he replied. “I’ll meet her at the front table!” He drifted in from the tables, toward the central cavity. All six cardinal points had customer wings. The Podmaster had allowed, encouraged, them to knock out walls and consume the volume that had been meeting rooms. The parlor was now the biggest single space on the temp. Except for the Lake Park, it was the biggest single living space at L1. Today, almost three-quarters of all the Emergents and Qeng Ho were on-Watch simultaneously, the climax of the rushed preparations for the Spider Rescue. And for a short time before the final push, virtually everyone was here at Benny’s. The affair was as much a reunion as it was a rescue and a new beginning.
The central core of the parlor was an icosahedron of display devices, a tent of their best remaining video wallpaper. It was primitive and warmly communal at the same time. From all directions, his customers would look inward at the shared views. Benny glided quickly across the empty space, his feet just missing a corner of the displays. In the directions outward from here, he could see the hundreds of his customers, dozens of tables nestled among the vines and flowers. He grabbled a vine and brought himself to a graceful stop at a table on the up wing, at the edge of the empty core. “The table of honor” was how Tomas Nau had put it.
“Qiwi! Please, sit and be welcome!” He flipped over the table to float beside her.
Qiwi Lisolet smiled hesitantly back at Benny. By now she was five or six years older than he, but suddenly she seemed very young, uncertain. Qiwi was holding something close at her shoulder; it was one of the North Paw kittens, the first that Benny had ever seen outside of the Lake Park. Qiwi looked around the parlor, as if surprised to see the crowds. “So almost everyone is here.”
“Yes we are! We’re so glad you could come. You can give us the inside view of what’s going on.” A goodwill ambassador from the Podmaster. And Qiwi looked the part. No pressure-coveralls for Qiwi today. She wore a lacey dress that floated in soft swirls as she moved. Even at the Lake Park open house she hadn’t looked so beautiful.
Qiwi sat hesitantly at the table. Benny sat down for a moment too, a courtesy. He handed her a control wand. “This is what Gonle gave me; sorry we don’t have better.” He pointed out the display and link options. “And this gives you voice access to all the parlor. Please use it. More than anyone here, you know what’s going on.”
After a moment, Qiwi took the wand. Her other hand held tight to the kitten. The creature wriggled its wings into a more comfortable position, but didn’t otherwise complain. For years Qiwi had been the most popular of the Podmaster’s inner circle. She wasn’t really an ambassador; she was more like a princess. That was how Benny had once described her to Gonle Fong. Gonle had smirked cynically at the word, and then agreed with him. Qiwi was trusted by all, a gentle restraint on tyranny…And yet there were times when she seemed to be lost. Today was one of those times. Benny sat back in his seat. Let the others do some hustling for a bit. Somehow he knew that Qiwi needed his time more.
She looked up after a moment, a little of the old smile on her face. “Yes, I can run the show. Tomas showed me how.” She loosened her grip on the kitten and patted his hand. “Don’t worry, Benny. This rescue is a tricky thing, but we’ll bring it off.”
She played with the wand, and the display core of the parlor flared into announcement colors, the light splashing back onto the flowered vines. When she spoke, her voice came from a thousand microspeakers, phased so that she seemed at everyone’s side. “Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show.” Her voice was happy and confident, the Qiwi they all knew.
The display core was sorting itself into multiple views: Qiwi’s face, Arachna as seen from the Invisible Hand, Podmaster Nau working at his lodge at North Paw, schematics of the Hand’s orbit and the military configuration of the various Spider nations.
“As you know, our old friend Victory Smith has just arrived in Southland. In a few moments she’ll be at their parliament, and we’ll have a treat none of us have experienced before—a direct human-camera view from the ground. Finally, after all these years, we’ll be seeing firsthand.” On the big center display, Qiwi’s face opened into a smile. “Think of it as a taste of things to come, the beginning of our life with the people of Arachna.
“But before we get to that point, you know we have a war to prevent, and our presence finally to reveal.” She looked down at the displays, and her voiced hesitated, as if she were suddenly struck by the enormity of what they were attempting. “We have planned to announce ourselves in just over forty Ksec, when our low-orbit network manipulations are in place, and the Hand’s orbit takes it over the capitals of both Kindred and Accord. I think you know how tricky it will be. The Spiders, our hoped-for friends, are poised on more dangerous ground than most human civilizations can survive. But I know you have prepared for this day well. When the time for announcement and contact comes, I know we will succeed.
“So, watch for now. Soon we will be very busy.”
FIFTY-TWO
Oddly enough, Rachner Thract retained his rank of colonel, not that former colleagues would trust him to scrape out their latrines. General Smith had treated him gently. They couldn’t prove he was a traitor, and apparently she was unwilling to use extreme interrogation on him. So Colonel Rachner Thract, formerly of the unnamed service, found himself
with a salary and per diem worthy of full duty…and nothing whatsoever to do.
It had been four days since that terrible meeting at Lands Command, but Thract had seen his disgrace building for almost a year. When it finally overcame him…it had been such a relief, except for the unhappy detail that he survived it, a living ghost.
Old-time officers, especially Tiefers, would decapitate themselves after such ignominy. Rachner Thract was one-half Tiefer, but he hadn’t cut off his head with a weighted blade. Instead, he’d numbed his brain with five straight days of fizz, chewing his way round and round the Calorica Strip. An idiot right to the end. Calorica was the only place in the world where it was too warm to lapse into fizz coma.
So he’d heard the reports that someone—Smith, it had to be Smith—was flying to Southmost, was trying to recover something of what Thract had lost. As the hours counted down toward Smith’s arrival at Southmost, Rachner had eased off on the fizz. He sat staring at the news feeds in the public houses. Sat and prayed that somehow Victory Smith could succeed where Thract’s life effort had failed. But he knew that she would fail. No one believed him, and even Rachner Thract didn’t know the how and why. But he was sure: There was something backing up the Kindred. Even the Kindred didn’t know about it, but it was there, twisting every one of the Accord’s technical advantages back on itself.
On the multiple screens, live from Southmost, Smith passed through the Great Doors of Parliament Hall. Even here, the rowdiest public house on the Strip, the clientele was suddenly very silent. Thract settled his head upon the bar, and felt his stare become glazed.
And then his telephone began ringing. Rachner hauled it out of his jacket. He held it by his head, stared at it with uninterested disbelief. It must be broken. Or someone was sending him an advertisement. Nothing important could ever come over this unsecured piece of junk.
He was about to throw it to the floor when the cobber on the next perch whacked him across the back. “Damn military bum! Get out!” she shouted.
Thract came off his perch, not sure if he was about to follow the other’s demand, or defend the honor of Smith and all the others who tried to keep the peace.
In the end, house management decided the issue; Thract found himself out on the street, cut off from the television that might have shown him what his General was attempting. And his telephone was still ringing. He stabbed ACCEPT and snarled something incoherent into the microphone.
“Colonel Thract, is that you?” The words were jerky and garbled, but the voice was vaguely familiar. “Colonel? Is your end a secure comm?”
Thract swore loudly. “The bleeding hell no!”
“Oh thank goodness!” came the almost-familiar voice. “There’s a chance then. Surely even they can’t meddle with all the world’s idle talk.”
They. The emphasis cut through Thract’s fizz hangover. He brought the microphone close his maw, and his next words came out almost casually curious. “Who is this?”
“Sorry. Obret Nethering here. Please don’t hang up. You probably don’t remember me. Fifteen years ago, I taught a short course on remote sensing. At Princeton. You sat in.”
“I, ah, remember.” In fact, it had been a rather good course.
“You do? Oh good, good! So you’ll know I’m not a crank. Sir, I know how busy you must be right now, but I pray you’ll give me just a minute of your time. Please.”
Thract was suddenly aware of the street and the buildings around him. Calorica Strip stretched around the bottom of the volcanic bowl, perhaps the warmest place left on the surface of the world. But the Strip was just a faded memory of the time when Calorica had been a playground for the super-rich. The bars and hotels were dying. Even the snowfalls were long ended. The snow piled up in the alley behind him was two years old, littered with fizz barf and streaked with urine. My high-tech command center.
Thract hunkered down, out of the wind. “I suppose I can give you a moment.”
“Oh, thank you! You’re my last hope. All my calls to Professor Underhill come up blocked. Not surprising, now that I understand…” Thract could almost hear the cobber collecting his wits, trying not to blather. “I’m an astronomer out on Paradise Island, Colonel. Last night I saw”—a spaceship as big as a city, its drives lighting the sky…and ignored by Air Defense and all the networks. Nethering’s descriptions were short and blunt, and took just under a minute. The astronomer continued. “I’m no crank, I tell you. This is what we saw! Surely there are hundreds of eyewitnesses, but somehow it’s invisible to Air Defense. Colonel, you’ve got to believe me.” His tone segued into uncomfortable self-realization, an understanding that no one in his right mind could buy such a story.
“Oh, I believe you,” Rachner said softly. It was a floridly paranoid vision…and it explained everything.
“What did you say, Colonel? Sorry, I can’t send you much hard evidence. They cut our landline about half an hour ago; I’m using a hobbyist’s packet radio to reach rout—” Several syllables were jumbled into incoherence. “So that’s really all I had to tell you. Maybe this is some Deepest Secret plot on the part of Air Defense. If you can’t say anything, I’ll understand. But I had to try to get through. That ship was so large, and—”
For a moment, Thract thought the other had paused, overcome. But the silence continued for several seconds, and then a synthetic voice blatted from the telephone’s tiny speaker: “Message 305. Network error. Please retry your call later.”
Rachner slowly tucked the telephone back in his jacket. His maw and eating hands were numb, and it wasn’t just the cold air. Once upon a time, his network intelligence cobbers had done a study on automated snooping. Given enough computing power, it was in principle possible to monitor every in-the-clear communication for keywords, and trigger security responses. In principle. In fact, development of the necessary computers always lagged behind the size of the contemporary public networks. But now it looked like someone had just that power.
A Deep Secret plot on the part of Air Defense? Not likely. Over the last year, Rachner Thract had watched the mysteries and the failures encroach from all directions. Even if Accord Intelligence and Pedure and all the intelligence agencies of the world had cooperated, they could not have produced the seamless lies that Thract had sensed. No. Whatever they faced was larger than the world, a grander evil than anything Spiderly.
And now at last he had something concrete. His mind should climb into combat alertness; instead he was filled with panicked confusion. Damn the fizz. If they were up against an alien force so deep, so crafty—what did it matter that Obret Nethering and now Rachner Thract knew the truth? What could they do? But Nethering had been permitted to talk for more than a minute. He’d spoken a number of keywords before the connection was chopped. The aliens might be better than Spiders—but they weren’t gods.
The thought brought Thract to a halt. So they weren’t gods. The word of their monster ship must be percolating across the civilized world, slowed and suppressed to one-on-one contacts between little people without access to power. But that couldn’t hide the secret more than a few hours. And that meant…whatever the purpose of this vast fraud, it must be headed for consummation in the next few hours. Right now the chief was risking her life down at Southmost, trying to bail them out from a disaster that was actually a trap. If I could get through to her, to Belga, to anybody at the top…
But telephones and network mail would be worse than useless. He needed some direct contact. Thract ran a weaving course down the deserted sidewalk. There was a bus stop somewhere beyond the corner. How long until the next one came through? He still had his private helicopter, a rich cobber’s toy…that might be too network-smart. The aliens might simply take it over and crash him. He pushed the fear away. Just now, the chopper was his only hope. From the heliport he could reach any place within two hundred miles. Who would be in that range? He skidded around the corner. Grand Boulevard extended off beneath an endless row of trichrome lights, down from the Strip and
through the Calorica forest. The forest was long dead, of course. Not even its leaves were left to spore, the ground beneath being too warm. The center had been cleared flat for a heliport. From there he could fly to…Thract’s gaze reached across the bowl. The boulevard lights dwindled to tiny sparkles. Once upon a time, they had ascended the caldera walls, to the mansions of the Waning Years. But the truly rich had abandoned their palaces. Only a few were still occupied, inaccessible from below.
But Sherkaner Underhill was up there, back from Princeton. At least that had been the word in the last situation report he had seen, the day his career had ended. He knew the stories about Underhill, that the poor cobber had lost it mentally. No matter. What Thract needed was a sidewise path into Lands Command, maybe through the chief’s daughter, a path that did not pass through the net.
A minute later the city bus pulled up behind Thract. He hopped aboard, the only passenger, even though it was mid-morning. “You’re in luck.” The driver grinned. “The next one isn’t until three hours after noon.”
Twenty miles an hour, thirty. The bus rumbled down the Grand Boulevard toward the Dead Forest Heliport. I can be on his doorstep in ten minutes. And suddenly Rachner was aware of the fizz barf that crusted his maw and eating hands, of the stains on his uniform. He brushed at his head, but there was nothing he could do about the uniform. A madman come to see a senile old coot. Maybe it was fitting. It also might be the last chance any of them had.
A decade earlier, in friendlier times, Hrunkner Unnerby had advised the Southlanders in the design of New Southmost Under. So in a strange way, things became more familiar after they left the Accord Embassy and entered Southland territory. There were lots of elevators. The Southland had wanted a Parliament Hall that would survive a nuclear strike. He had warned them that future ordnance developments would likely make their goal impossible, but the Southlanders hadn’t listened, and had wasted substantial resources that could have gone to Dark Time agriculture.