by Vernor Vinge
Underville’s eating hands spread in a gesture that Pham recognized as a doubting smile. “You do sound like Khelm! But see, your theory ‘explains’ all sorts of things without helping to do anything, much less providing tests for itself.”
Gonle Fong jabbed at the air with her hand, a Spiderish gesture unconsciously adopted. “So what’s to disagree? ‘Arachna was a place where once all the Failed Dreams were true.’ Fine. It’s a simple, unifying assumption. At the same time, we live in the here and now, a few hundred light-years, a few thousand years. Whatever the explanation, there is a lifetime of profit to be made just playing with what we see on Arachna now!”
Pham nodded politely. “Yes. A good Qeng Ho attitude. But, Gonle—I was born in a civilization of castles and cannon. I’ve lived a long time—not counting coldsleep—and I’ve seen a lot. Since the Dawn Age, we humans have learned a little here, a little there—but mainly we’ve learned of limits. Planetary civilizations rise and fall. At the height they’re wonderful things, but there is so much darkness.” Castles and cannon, and worse. “And even the Qeng Ho—we survive and prosper, but we’ve found limits that we can only edge toward, like lightspeed itself. I broke myself on those limits at Brisgo Gap. When I learned about Focus, I thought it might be the way to end the darkness between civilizations. I was wrong.” He looked into Anne’s eyes. “So I gave up my dream, the dream of my whole life…and then I looked around. Here at Arachna, we’ve finally found something from outside all our limits. It’s a tiny glimpse, shreds and dregs of brightest glory. Gonle, there are planning horizons and there are planning horizons…Ezr asked me what I was going to do after we bring down the Emergents, after we all meet again. Well, just this: I’m going whence Arachna came.”
Trixia’s translation of his words rattled on a moment longer, and then there was absolute silence all around the table. Ezr sat transfixed. Pham had kept this between himself and Anne; considering all else that was happening, it had been an easy secret to keep. But Ezr Vinh had lived his whole life admiring the Dawn Age and the Failed Dreams, and now he saw how they might yet be attained. The boy stared for a moment, enraptured. Then critical thought came awake again. His words weren’t complaints; he wanted Pham’s plan to succeed, but—
“But what bearing will you take? And—”
“What bearing? That’s the easy question, though we’ll have a couple of centuries to think it over. But look, Humankind has been staring at the stars with high technology for thousands of years. At one time or another, almost every Customer civilization has mounted arrays of hundred-meter mirrors, and undertaken all the other clever ways to snoop on things far away. We see some far enigmas. Here and there across this galaxy we see ramscoops and ancient radio transmissions.”
“So if there were anything more, we would have seen it,” said Ezr, but he clearly knew what was coming. The arguments were ancient history.
“Only if it’s a place we can look. But parts of the galactic core are plenty shrouded. If our supercivilization doesn’t use radio, if they have something better than ramscoops…down by the core is the one place they might have escaped our detection.” And OnOff’s eccentric orbit had at least passed through those unseen depths.
“Okay, Pham. I agree, it all fits. But you’re talking about thirty thousand light-years to the core, almost that far to the umbral clouds.”
Gonle: “That’s a hundred times farther than anything the Qeng Ho have tried. Without depot civilizations in between, your ramscoops will fail in less than a thousand years. We can dream of such a mission, but it’s totally beyond our ability.”
Pham grinned at them all: “It’s totally beyond our ability now.”
“That’s what I said! It’s always been beyond us.”
But the light was beginning to come on in Ezr’s eyes. “Gonle, he means that it may not be beyond us in the future.”
“Yes!” Pham leaned forward, wondering how many of them he could capture in this dream. “Do a little mind experiment. Put yourself back in the Dawn Age. Back then, for a few brief centuries, people expected things to become radically improved in the future. With Arachna, you will bring a little bit of that spirit back. Maybe you don’t believe it now. You don’t see the civilization that you are building. Ezr and Qiwi, you’re founding a Great Family that will outshine any in Qeng Ho history. Trixia and Victory and all the Spiders will be the greatest thing that ever happened to our business. And you’re just beginning to understand the contradictions of Arachna. You’re right; today, talk of ’faring toward the core is like a child wading in the surf and talking of crossing an ocean. But I’ll lay you a wager: By the next Bright Time, you’ll have the technology I need.”
He looked at Anne beside him. She smiled back, a grin that was both happy and a little mocking. “Anne and I and those on our fleet of three intend to take down the Emergent system. If we succeed there—when we succeed—what’s left will still be a high-tech civilization. We’ll make a larger fleet, at least a fleet of twenty. And Anne will let me rename her flagship the Wild Goose. And we will return here and outfit to go…a-searching.” And would Anne really come with him then? She said she would. Would tearing down the Emergents’ tyranny lift the geas that drove her? Maybe not. Winning would leave whole worlds like the deFocus ward in Hammerfest’s Attic. Maybe she would find it impossible to leave the people she had rescued. What then? I don’t know. Once upon a time, he was very good at being alone. Now, how strangely I have changed.
Anne’s smile was gentle now. She squeezed his hand and nodded at the pact he had just described. Pham glanced from face to face: Qiwi looked stunned. Ezr looked like someone who desperately wanted to believe, but had more than a life-full of other endeavors to distract him. As for the Spiders, their aspects ranged from Underville’s truculent “show me” to—
Throughout his speech, Victory Lighthill had sat still and silent, even her eating hands motionless. Now she spoke, a burring warble, soft and sad and wondering, that needed Trixia to translate the words: “Daddy would have loved this plan.”
“Yes.” Pham’s voice caught. Underhill had been a genius and a dreamer, straight out of the Dawn Age. Pham had long since read Trixia’s “videomancy diaries,” the story of Underhill’s counterlurk. The cobber had dug deep into the Emergents’ automation, sometimes so deep that the Focused Anne Reynolt had noticed the tampering and thought it evidence of human conspiracy. At the end, Underhill knew what Focus was; he knew the humans didn’t have AI or any technology enormously beyond his own. Sherkaner Underhill must have been very disappointed to learn the limits of progress.
Beside him, Anne started to nod, hesitated. And that was when she surprised them all, herself included, but the Spiders most of all. She cocked her head, and a slow smile started across her face. “And what makes you think he didn’t survive? He had as much information as any of us—and a good bit more imagination. What makes you think this isn’t his plan, too?”
“Anne, I’ve read the diaries. If he were alive, he’d be here.”
She shook her head. “I wonder. Wanderdeep is something we humans aren’t built to understand, and Sherkaner thought sure that Smith was dead. But Sherkaner Underhill confounded both humans and Spiders more than once. He took Spiderness in unthought directions—he saw the deepness in the sky. I think he’s down there somewhere, and he intends to outlast all the mysteries.”
“It could be…it could be.” The words, ultimately Trixia’s or Victory’s, Pham could not tell, were spoken in soft awe. “We don’t really know where he landed on the altiplano. If it was something he had scouted out before, he would have a chance.”
Pham looked outward, at Arachna. The planet spread across thirty degrees, a vast, black pearl. Traceries of gold and silver gleamed all across the continent into the southern hemisphere, and across the faint luster of the eastern sea. And yet, there were still large areas of unrelieved dark, protected lands that would remain still and cold until the end of the Dark. Pham felt a sudden thr
ill of understanding. Yes. Somewhere down there the old Spider might still sleep, waiting for his lady lost…and beginning on his greatest Lurk of all.
So high, so low, so many things to know.
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
VERNOR VINGE won the Hugo Award for his novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award four times, for the novels The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), for the novella True Names (1981), and for a novelette. His best-known works are admired for their extraordinary combination of groundbreaking science-fiction concepts and epic adventures of great emotional power. Sought widely by publications as disparate as Rolling Stone and Wired, he is in constant demand as a speaker to scientific forums in the field of cybernetics and especially the area of human and machine intelligence. He has had a number of short stories published in Analog and other science-fiction magazines. He is a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Diego State University and currently lives in San Diego.