A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought, #1)

by Vernor Vinge

No reader is the same after thirty years, of course; those of us old enough to have forgotten most of what we learned have still learned much.

SF itself has changed over these three decades, from the Indian Summer of its early 1990s pomp, when an SF story could still be trusted to stay SF all the way through, until now, three decades onwards, we find ourselves encountering sadder, maybe wiser, assemblages of story that contain SF, but more fantastical and at the same time world-sensitive than before: AWD vehicles designed to cope with the badlands of the world we seem to have entered.

In 1990, though the information revolution may have hardly begun, Sputnik and its breed had already brought space down to earth.

No longer a frontier threshold in the mind’s eye, a “grammar” of story fundamental to the megatext, near-future space was becoming a day-job extension of history as we lived it, a confirmation of the nightmare we had hoped to escape: the sense of wonder reduced to mission statements.

sepulchres, whole populations husked into obscene puppets. By 2020, when it seems increasingly obvious that when you choose to starve with a tiger, “the tiger starves last” (Walt Kelly), we feel not so much an exhilaration of dread as a dread resignation.

singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane, just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.

The curse of the mummy’s tomb, a comic image from mankind’s own prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed with joy at the treasure … and determined to be cautious just the same. They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum,

So now there was a tiny settlement, and they called it the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn’t a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned.… Humans starting fires and playing with the flames.

The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much overrated. Most automation works far better as part of a whole, and even if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.

But the local net at the High Lab had transcended—almost without the humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness … and occasionally the need.

They drifted from node to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the landing field. An armed frigate and an empty container vessel were all that sat there. It had been six months since resupply. A safety precaution early suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the Trap.

We are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by the Power that soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost remembered humanity, became echoes.… “Poor humans; they will all die.” “Poor us; we will not.”

“I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway.” Once upon a time we wer...

“Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It’s an old evil they’ve wakened. Till it’s ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every message from home.”

The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than anything humans could imagine.

Even its shadow was something more than human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife.

“Still,” thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the craziest outs, “we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us.” “The evil is young, barely three days old.”

“Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a great evil in this archive.” “Perhaps they found two.” “Or an antidote.”

“I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible too. Perhaps all together, we can make a greater impossibility come true.” Perhaps we can hurt the evil newly born here.

Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.

“Preparations for normal departure,” was how they described the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been refitting the frigate—behind a mask of transparent lies.

Some of the humans understood that what they had wakened could be the end of them, that it might be the end of their Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such disasters, stories of races that had played with fire and had burned for it. None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had fallen upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million star systems.

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so close. The dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this time held.

The newborn felt all its powers of before, in potential … yet there should be something more, something it had learned in its fall, or something left by its enemies (if there ever were such).

Their escape attempt, so carefully concealed. The effort had been humored till now; it was not quite time for the flowering, and the humans were still of some use.

Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations rampaged through the humans’ databases. Checking, just to be sure.

finally spotting one incredible item: Inventory: quantum data container, quantity (1), loaded to the frigate one hundred hours before!

million schedules were suddenly advanced. An orderly flowering was out of the question now, and so there was no more need for the humans left in the Lab.

Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no software could finesse.

The newborn’s agents flitted everywhere across the ship’s computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second away, under the gray rubble at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So. The frigate would be destroyed.

Two hundred thousand kilometers away, the clumsy container vessel made its own ultradrive jump and vanished from sight. The newborn scarcely noticed. So a few humans had escaped; the universe was welcome to

the seconds that followed, the newborn felt … emotions?… things that were more, and less, than a human might feel. Try emotions: Elation. The newborn knew that now it would survive. Horror. How close it had come to dying once more.

What was lost might have made the newborn still more powerful … but more likely was deadly poison. After all, this Power had lived once before, then been reduced to nothing. What was lost might have been the reason.

Suspicion. The newborn should not have been so fooled. Not by mere humans. The newborn convulsed into self-inspection and panic.

Yes, there were blindspots, carefully installed from the beginning, and not by the humans. Two had been born here. Itself … and the poison, the reason for its fall of old. The newborn inspected itself as never before, knowing now just what to seek. Destroying, purifying, rechecking, searching for sign...

The new Power’s mood drifted, calmed. A human might call the feeling triumph, anticipation.

The newborn looked across the stars, planning. This time things will be different.

Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.

“Well, I haven’t traveled much, and I’m fairly new. But I do read. A lot. There’s never been anything like this before. That is a made thing down there. It came from higher than I can measure. You’ve read Aramstriquesa or Astrologer Belelele? You know what this could be?”

Wickwrackrum didn’t recognize the names. But he was a pilgrim. There were lands so far away that no one there spoke any language he knew. In the Southseas he met folk who thought there was no world beyond their islands and who ran from his boats when he came ashore. Even more, one part of him had been an islander and had watched that landing. He stuck a head into the open and looked again at the fallen star, the visitor from farther than he had ever been … and he wondered where this pilgrimage might end.

She could see the archers now. More dogs! They moved in packs. It took two of them to use a bow—one to hold it and one to draw. The third and fourth carried quivers of arrows and just seemed to watch.

The archers hung back, staying mostly under cover. Other packs swirled in from the sides, now leaping over the hummocks. Many carried hatchets in their jaws. Metal tines gleamed on their paws. She heard the snickety of Dad’s pistol. The wave of attackers staggered as individuals collapsed. The others continued forward, snarling now. These were sounds of madness, not the barking of dogs. She felt the sounds in her teeth, like blasti music punching from a large speaker. Jaws and claws and knives and noise.

There were four legs per member, but it walked on its rear legs only. What a clown! Yet … it used its front paws for holding things. Not once did he see it use a mouth; he doubted if the flat jaws could get a good hold, anyway. Those forepaws were wonderfully agile. A single member could easily use tools.

conversation sounds, even though only three members were visible. After a while, they heard the much higher pitched tones of organized thought; God, the creature was noisy. At this distance, the sounds were muffled and distorted. Even so, they were like no mind he had ever heard, nor like the confusion noises that some grazers made.

combat whistle sounded, and the mob parted. A trooper raced through and sprayed liquid fire the instant it was past the front. The flying house looked like meat on a griddle, flame and smoke coming up all around it.

The path was wider now and roughly paved. He knew the harbor fort was above them, hidden by the trees. The sun was well out of the north, rising into the eastern sky. Flowers were everywhere, white and red and violet, their tufts floating thick on the breeze—the arctic plant life taking advantage of its long day of summer. Walking on sun-dappled cobblestones, you might almost forget the ambush on the hilltops.

Much, much later he learned that his keeper had counted by legs and the builder of the castle by fore-claws. Thus he ended up in the wrong room. It was a mistake that would change the history of worlds.

The only way you could change the display was by rubbing it out. Wow. Just like olden times on Nyjora, before Straumli Realm!

The baseboard below the scrolls was black stone, glossy. Someone had used scraps of chalk to draw on it. The stick-figure dogs were crude; they reminded Jefri of pictures little kids draw in kinderschool. He stopped, remembering all the children

“We’re beyond the Beyond,” Mom had said, “making God.” When she first said it, she laughed. Later when people said it, they seemed more and more scared. The last hours had been crazy, the coldsleep drills finally for real. All his friends were in those boxes.… He wept into the awful silence. There was no one to hear, no one to help him.