A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2)

by Vernor Vinge

Over the last few generations, we military types have done our little desecrations around the edges of the Dark. But Unnerby’s team will see the center of the Deepest Dark. What can that really be like? Yes, we think we know: the frozen air, the vacuum. But that’s all guesses. I’m not religious, Colonel Smith, but … I wonder at what they may find.’ Religious or not, all the ancient superstitions of snow-trolls and earth angels seemed to hover just behind the general’s words. Even the most rational quailed before the thought of a Dark so intense that in a sense the world did not exist.

‘In a sense, Underhill has no patience for details, but that doesn’t matter. He generates an entourage which does. He’s just … remarkable.’

Coming awake from the Dark was not like waking from an ordinary sleep. A thousand poets had written about the moment and – in recent eras – ten thousand academics had studied it.

awake from the Dark was done in pieces. Vision, touch, hearing. Memory, recognition, thought. Did they happen first one and then another and another? Or did they happen all at once, but with the parts not communicating? Where did ‘mind’ begin from all the pieces?

Before the invention of the microscope, the ‘great thinkers’ claimed that what separated the higher animals from the rest of life was their ability to survive as individuals through the Great Dark. Plants and simpler animals died; it was only their encysted eggs that survived. Nowadays, it was known that many single-celled animals survived freezing just fine, and without having to retreat to deepnesses.

We are here at last. The first to ever look upon the Deepest Dark. It was a world that some ancient philosophers had denied existence – for how can something be, that can never be observed? But now it was seen. It did exist, centuries of cold and stillness … and stars everywhere.

‘Sure. But other things will change, too. This is the last Dark that Spiderkind will ever sleep through. Next time, it won’t be just four cobbers in airsuits. All civilization will stay awake. We’re going to colonize the Dark, Hrunkner.’

It’s not just that we’ve created a pyschoactive microbe. This is one whose growth within the brain can be controlled with millimeter precision – and once in place, the ensemble can be guided in its actions with the same precision.’ Vinh’s response was so blank that it penetrated even Reynolt’s attention. ‘Don’t you see? We can improve the attention-focusing aspects of consciousness: we can take humans and turn them into analytical engines.’ She spelled it out in wretched detail. On the Emergent worlds, the Focusing process was spread over the last years of a specialist’s schooling, intensifying the graduate-school experience to produce genius.

Ezr choked on a sob. He was supposed to convince others to accept what he would have died to prevent. In all his schooling, all his reading, all his nineteen years of life, he had never imagined there could be anything so difficult.

For both Qeng Ho and Emergents, the Exile would last for decades. Much of that time would be spent off-Watch, in coldsleep … but they still had years stretching before them. And Tomas Nau needed all the survivors. For now, the Qeng Ho were beaten down, raped, and – so Tomas Nau must be led to think – deceived. The cool one within him, the one who could kill, looked out upon that future with grim intent. This was not the life that Ezr Vinh had ever dreamed would be his. There would be no friends he could safely confide in. There would be enemies and fools all around. He watched Trinli’s fight vanish at the entrance to the park. Fools like Pham Trinli could be used. As long as it didn’t implicate competent Qeng Ho, Trinli was a sacrifice piece in the game. Tomas Nau had set him a role for life, and his greatest reward might be nothing more than revenge. (But maybe a chance, the original watcher tried to say, maybe a chance that Reynolt wasn’t lying about Trixia and the reversability of Focus.)

‘Radioactivity? You’re going to keep us warm with tons of refined radium?’ Maybe the great secret was that the Crown’s high command was reading Amazing Science. Such incredulity rolled off Underhill’s back as smoothly as ever. ‘There are several possibilities. If they are pursued with imagination, I have no doubt that I will have the numbers on my side by the time of the next Waning.’ And the General said, ‘Just so you understand, Sergeant. I do have doubts. But this is something we can’t afford to overlook. Even if the scheme doesn’t work, the failure could be a weapon a thousand times deadlier than anything in the Great War.’

Sherk, let’s consider the ‘‘best case’’ scenario that you claim we narrow-minded military types always ignore. Let’s say the scientists get things figured out. Say that in ten years, or by 60//20 at the outside, we start building atomic power plants for your hypothetical ‘‘cities-in-the-Dark.’’ Even if the rest of the world hasn’t discovered atomic power on its own, this sort of construction cannot be kept secret. So even if there is no other reason for war, there will be an arms race. And it will be a lot worse than anything in the Great War.’ Unnerby: ‘Ugh. Yes. The first to colonize the Dark would own the world.’

Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely … the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

‘But Qeng Ho is just one fish in a random sea of traders… . Oh.’ Pham could see that he was finally getting through. ‘So the ‘‘culture’’ of our broadcasts would give participants a trading edge. So there would be a reinforcement effect.’ ‘Yes, yes! And we could crypto-partition the broadcasts to protect against nearby competition.’ Pham smiled slyly. The next point was something that little Pham, and probably Pham’s father the King of all Northland, could never have conceived. ‘In fact, we could even have some broadcasts in the clear. The language standards material, for instance, and the low end of our tech libraries. I’ve been reading the Customer histories. All the way back to Old Earth, the only constant is the churn, the rise of civilization, the fall, as often as not the local extinction of Humankind. Over time, Qeng Ho broadcasts could damp those swings.’

And indeed, Pham had already found Something New, something so powerful that the origin of the Spiders was now a peripheral issue for him. Pham had found Focus. With Focus, the Emergents could convert their brightest people into dedicated machines of thought. A dud like Trud Silipan could get effective translations at the touch of a key. A monster like Tomas Nau could have eyes unresting. Focus gave the Emergents a power that no one had ever had before, subtlety that surpassed any machine and patience that surpassed any human. That was one of the Failed Dreams – but they had achieved it.

‘You, damn it! Your insight! Since the first year of the project, you’ve been hidden away up here in Princeton, doing God knows what.’ ‘Oh … Look Hrunkner, I’m sorry. The atomic power stuff just isn’t very interesting to me anymore.’ Knowing Underhill for all these years, Unnerby should not have been surprised by the comment. Nevertheless, it made him want to chew on his hands. Here was a fellow who abandoned fields of endeavor before others even knew they existed. If he were simply a crank, there’d be no problem. As it was, sometimes Unnerby would have cheerfully killed the cobber.

It had certainly never bothered him that she was born out-of-phase herself; that was something a person had no control over. But that she would start a family at the beginning of a New Sun, that she would damn her own children as she had been damned … And they aren’t even all the same age.

the zipheads are the next system layer above software. They can apply human intelligence, but with the persistence and patience of a machine.

The real secret of the Qeng Ho version was that no added interface was necessary, for output or input. If you knew the secret, you could access the Qeng Ho localizers directly, let the localizers sense your body position, interpret the proper codings, and respond with built-in effectors. It didn’t matter that the Emergents had removed all front-end interfaces from the temp. Now a Qeng Ho interface was all around them, for anyone who knew the secrets.

It was something of a miracle that the human race had survived long enough to escape Earth. There were so many ways that an intelligent race could make itself extinct.

Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, it ossified and politics carried it into a fall.

But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did – a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers.

That should be time enough to do the absolutely necessary, to invade the fleet net and establish a new cover story. What would it be? Something shameful, yes. Some shameful reason for ‘Pham Trinli’ to play the buffoon all these years. A story that Nau and Brughel could relate to and think to use as a lever against him. What?

He has no concept of the limits of software design, and of the limits that puts on hardware. He thinks immortality and godlike computers are just around the corner, the product of just a little more progress. He’s a walking library of the Failed Dreams.’

The monster. The Frenkisch Orc. Of course, Anne Reynolt was neither. She was a tall, slender woman – as much a human as Pham Nuwen or any of the far descendants of Earth. Now the carven legends on the Hammerfest walls had a clear translation. For years and years, Anne Reynolt had fought against Focus, her people driven back step by step, to that last redoubt in the mountains. Anne of Arnham! Now all that remained was the myth of a twisted monster … and the real monsters like Ritser Brughel, the descendants of the surviving Frenks, the conquered and the Focused.

Dreams die in every life. Everyone gets old. There is promise in the beginning when life seems so bright. The promise fades when the years get short.

Anne Reynolt would eventually recover from what he had done to her. When that happened, the game of cat-and-mouse would resume, but this time he must protect her and all the other slaves. It would be so much harder than before. But maybe with Ezr Vinh, if they worked as a real team … The plans formed and re-formed in Pham’s mind. It was a far cry from breaking the wheel of history, but there was a strange, rising pleasure in doing what felt wholly right. And somewhere before he finally fell asleep, he remembered Gunnar Larson, the old man’s gentle mocking, the old man’s advice that Pham understand the limits of the natural world, and accept them. So maybe he was right. Funny. All the years in this room he had lain awake, grinding his teeth, planning his plans and dreaming what he might do with Focus. Now that he had given it up, there were still plans, still terrible dangers … but for the first time in many years there was also … peace.

Trinli said, ‘We’ve known for years that the Spiders evolved here, that they never had a higher tech.’ ‘Quite so. And their own archeologists have no solid evidence of visitations. But this … this stuff is an artifact, even if only we can see it as such. Anne’s automation has spent several days on this. It’s a coordinated processing matrix.’ ‘I thought you said it was refined from native ores.’ ‘Yes. It makes the conclusion all the more fantastic. For forty years we’ve thought the diamond powders of Arachna were either infalls or biological skeletons. Now it looks like they are fossil processing devices. And at least some of them reassert their mission when brought close together. Like localizers, but much much smaller, and with a special purpose … to manipulate physical laws in ways we don’t begin to understand.’

When I first came to the observatory, the controls covered three walls, instruments and levers, almost all analog. Now most of the gear was tiny; digital, precise. Sometimes he joked with Shepry, asking him whether they should really trust anything they couldn’t see the guts of. Shepry had never understood his lack of faith in computer automation. Until tonight. ‘You know, Shepry, maybe we should make some phone calls.’

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.

Smith’s peace proposal was strong enough to bring the Spider militaries to a pause. It would give the humans time to announce themselves, and propose cooperation. That was the official story, a risky plan that would leave the Podmasters in a second-class position. In fact, about 7Ksec from now, Anne’s zipheads would initiate a sneak attack by Smith’s own military. The resulting Kindred ‘counterattack’ would complete the planned destruction. And we’ll step in and pick up the pieces.

The single row of destruction they had seen at Calorica was actually part of a grid. Stretched out south and west of them were hundreds of steaming plumes. The antimissile fields. But the crappers had missed! Wave after wave of interceptor rockets were sweeping up from their silos across the altiplano. Hundreds of launches, quick and profligate as short-range rocket artillery—except that the silos were dozens of miles away. Those rocket plumes were pushing smart payloads toward long-range intercepts thousands of miles away, and scores of miles up. It was awesome beyond all the staff-meeting hype that Air Defense had ever shilled … and it must mean that the Kindred had just launched everything they had.

‘You know the most evil thing about Focus? It’s not that it’s effective slavery, though Lord knows that puts it worse than most any other villainy. No, the greatest evil is that the rescuers become a type of killer themselves, and the original victims are mutilated a second time.

‘Dear Sherk was so sure of impossible things like A1. For me, Focus was like a dream. My mission was to understand you Spiders perfectly, and the emotions just came along with it. It was the side effect Tomas Nau never expected.’ Personhood as a Spider had come slowly, growing with each advance in language knowledge. The radio debate had been the turning point, where Trixia and Zinmin Broute and the others had actually transformed and taken sides in the perfection of their craft. I’m so sorry, Xopi. We were Focused and suddenly you were the enemy. When we scrambled your MRI codes, we didn’t really know we’d murdered you. Any of us could have been the Pedure translator, any of us could have been in your place. And that had been when Trixia first reached down across the comm links and revealed herself to Sherkaner Underhill.