The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (48 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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SIRBAT NUDGED GORST WITH HIS FOOT. THE OTHER’S CLAWED HAND LASHED out, barely missing our interpreter. The reverend sat up and groaned. Sirbat glanced at us. “You all right?” he asked.
I grunted something affirmative, and Tsumo nodded. An ugly bruise covered her jaw and cheek, and four deep scratches ran down her arm. She followed my glance. “Never mind, I’ll live.” She pulled the
‘mam’ri
from her pocket. “You’ll be pleased to know that this has survived. What do we do now?”
It was Sirbat who answered. “Same as before. We’ll stay here this night. Tomorrow you’ll be able to see the group death you’re so interested in.” He moved cautiously to the edge of the hole. The moon was overhead now, and the damage was clearly visible. The room directly below us was gutted, and its floor was partly burned through. The room below that looked pretty bad, too. “First, we have to get some way to go down through this hole.”
Brother Gorst rolled onto his feet and looked briefly at the destruction below. Then he ran to a small locker near the edge of the roof. He pulled out a coil of rope and threw it to Sirbat, who tied one end about the cross. Our interpreter moved slowly, almost clumsily. I looked closely at him, but in the moonlight he seemed uninjured. Sirbat pulled at the rope, making sure it was fast. Then he tossed the other end into the hole. “If past experience is a guide,” he said, “we won’t have any more
trouble this night. The young persons fight very hard, but they are bright and when they have knowledge that their chances are zero, they go away. Also, they fear flames more than any other thing.” He turned and slowly lowered himself hand over hand into the darkness. The rest of us followed.
My hands weren’t numb anymore. The rope felt like a brand on them. I slipped and fell the last meter to the floor. I stood up to see the two Shimans and Tsumo standing nearby. The Earthpol agent was fiddling with the
o-mamori,
trying to reestablish our cover.
What was left of the roof above us blocked the Earthpol ship from view. Through the jagged hole, the full moon spread an irregular patch of gray light on the wreckage around us. The floor had buckled and cracked under the explosion. Several large fragments from a marble table top rested near my feet. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could also see what was left of the juveniles who had used this route to surprise us on the roof. The room was a combination abattoir and ruin.
Gorst moved quickly to the west wall, dug into the rubble. His rummaging uncovered a ladder well: we wouldn’t have to use that rope again. Brother Gorst bent over and crawled down into the hole he had uncovered. All this time Sirbat just stood looking at the floor. Gorst called to him, and he walked slowly over to the ladder.
I WAS RIGHT ABOVE TSUMO AS WE CLIMBED DOWN. HER PROGRESS WAS clumsy, slow. It was a good thing the rungs were set only fifteen centimeters apart. A single beam of moonlight found its way over my shoulder and onto those below me.
If I hadn’t been looking in just the right spot, I could have missed what happened then. A screaming fury hurtled out of the darkness. Gorst, who was already on the floor below us, whirled at the sound, his claws extended. Then just before the juvenile struck, he lowered his arms, stood defenseless. Gorst paid for his stupidity as the juvenile slammed into him, knocking him flat. He was dead even before he touched ground: his throat was ripped out. Now the juvenile headed for us on the ladder.
A reflex three centuries old took over, and my knife was out of my sleeve and in my hand. I threw just before the creature reached Sirbat. One thing I knew was Shiman anatomy. Still, it was mostly luck that the knife struck the only unarmored section of its notochord. My fingers were just too ripped up for accurate throwing. The juvenile dived face first into the base of the ladder and lay still. For a long moment the rest of us were frozen, too. If more were coming, we didn’t have a chance. But the seconds passed and no other creatures appeared. The three of
us scrambled down to the floor. As I retrieved my knife, I noticed that the corpse’s flesh was practically parboiled. The juvenile must have been too shook up by the explosion to run off with the rest of the pack.
Sirbat walked past Gorst’s body without looking down at it. “Come on,” he said. You’d think I had just threatened his life rather than saved it.
This was the first level where the main stairs were still intact. We followed Sirbat down them, into the darkness. I couldn’t see a thing, and the stairs were littered with crap that had fallen in from the disaster area above us. Either Sirbat was a fool or he had some special reason to think we were safe. Finally, we reached a level where the electric lights were still working. Sirbat left the stairway, and we walked down a long, deserted corridor. He stopped at a half-open door, sniffed around, then stepped through the doorway and flicked on a light. “I have no doubt you’ll be safe here for this night.”
I looked inside. A bas relief forest had been cut in the walls and then painted green. Three wide cots were set near the middle of the room—on the only carpet I ever saw on Shima. And what did they use the place for? You got me.
But whatever its purpose, the room looked secure. A grated window was set in one wall—nothing was going to surprise us from that direction. And the door was heavy plastic with an inside lock.
Tsumo stepped into the room. “You’re not staying with us?” she asked Sirbat.
“No. That would not be safe.” He was already walking from the room. “Just keep memory, that you have to be up two hours before sunrise in order to get to the death place on time. Have your … machines ready.”
The arrogant bastard! What was “safe” for us was not safe enough for him. I followed the Shiman into the hall, debating whether to shake some answers out of him. But there were two good arguments against such action: 1) he might end up shaking me, and 2) unless we wanted to turn ourselves over to Earthpol, we didn’t have any choice but to play things his way. So I stepped back into the room and slammed the door. The lock fell to with a satisfying thunk.
Tsumo sat down heavily on one of the cots and pulled the
‘mam’ri
from its pouch. She played awkwardly with it for several seconds. In the bright blue light, her bruise was a delicate mauve. Finally she looked up. “We’re still undetected. But what happened tonight is almost certainly
f’un.
There hasn’t been a smashout from that particular school in nearly three years. If we stay here much longer, our … ‘bad luck’ is going to kill us.”
I grunted. Tsumo was at her cheery best. “In that case, I’ll need a
good night’s sleep. I don’t want to have to do that job twice.” I hit the light and settled down on the nearest bunk. Faint bands of gray light crossed the ceiling from the tiny window. The shadowed forest on the wall almost seemed real now.
Tomorrow was going to be tricky. I would be using unfamiliar equipment—Tsumo’s
‘mam’ri
—out-of-doors and at a relatively great distance from the dying. Even an orgy of death would be hard to analyze under those conditions. And all the time, we’d have Earthpol breathing down our necks. Several details needed thorough thinking out, but every time I tried to concentrate on them, I’d remember those juveniles scrambling up the church steeple at us. Over the last couple of centuries I’d had contact with three nonhuman races. The best competition I’d come across were the Draelings—carnivores with creative intelligence about 0.8 the human norm. I had never seen a group whose combined viciousness and cunning approached man’s. Until now: the Shimans
started
life by committing a murder. The well-picked skeletons in the alley showed the murders didn’t stop with birth. The average human would have to practice hard to be as evil as a Shiman is by inclination.
Tsumo’s voice came softly from across the room. She must have been reading my mind. “And they’re smart, too. See how much Sirbat has picked up in less than two years. He could go on learning at that rate for another century—if only he could live that long. The average is as inventive as our best. Fifty years ago there wasn’t a single steam engine on Shima. And you can be sure we in Earthgov didn’t help them invent one.”
In the pale light I saw her stand and cross to my bunk. Her weight settled beside me. My frostbitten hand moved automatically across her back.
“Money is no good if you are dead—and we’ll all die unless you fail tomorrow.” A soft hand slipped across my neck and I felt her face in front of mine.
She tried awfully hard to convince me. Toward the end, there in the darkness, I almost felt sorry for little Miss Machiavelli. She kept calling me Roger.
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING ME. I WOKE TO FIND TSUMO’S FACE HOVERING HAZILY in the air above me. I squinted against the hellishly bright light, and muttered, “Whassamatter?”
“Sirbat says it’s time to go to the cemetery.”
“Oh.” I swung my feet to the floor, and raised myself off the bunk. My hands felt like hunks of flayed meat. I don’t know how I was able to sleep with them. I steadied myself against the bed and looked around. The window was a patch of unrelieved darkness in the wall. We still
had a way to go before morning. Tsumo was dressed except for hood and veil, and she was pushing my costume at me.
I took the disguise. “Where the devil is Sirbat, anyway?” Then I saw him over by the door. On the floor. The Shiman was curled up in a tight ball. His bloodshot eyes roved aimlessly about, finally focused on me.
My jaw must have been resting on my chest. Sirbat croaked, “So, Professor, you have been getting knowledge of Shiman life all this time, but you did not ever take note of my condition. If it wasn’t for the special substances I’ve been taking I would have been like this days ago.” He stopped, coughed reddish foam.
O.K., I had been an idiot. The signs had all been there: Sirbat’s relative plumpness, his awkward slowness the last few hours, his comments about not being with us after the morning. My only excuse is the fact that death by old age had become a very theoretical thing to me. Sure, I studied it, but I hadn’t been confronted with the physical reality for more than a century.
But one oversight was enough: I could already see a mess of consequences ahead. I slipped the black dress over my head and put on the veil. “Tsumo, take Sirbat’s legs. We’ll have to carry him downstairs.” I grabbed Sirbat’s shoulders and we lifted together. The Shiman must have massed close to seventy-five kilos—about fifteen over the average adult’s weight. If he had been on drugs to curb the burrowing instinct, he might die before we got him to the cemetery—and that would be fatal all the way around. Now we had a new reason for getting to that cemetery on time.
We hadn’t gone down very many steps before Tsumo began straining under the load. She leaned to one side, favoring her left hand. Me, both hands felt like they were ready to fall off, so I didn’t have such trouble. Sirbat hung between us, clutching tightly at his middle. His head lolled. His jaws opened with tiny whimpering sounds, and reddish drool dripped down his head onto the steps. It was obviously way past burrowing time for him.
Sirbat gasped out one word at a breath. “Left turn, first story.”
Two more flights and we were on the ground. We turned left and staggered out the side door into a parking lot. No one was around this early in the morning. A sea fog had moved in and perfect halos hung around the only two street lamps left alight. It was so foggy we couldn’t even see the other side of the lot. For the first time since I’d been on Shima, the air was tolerably clean.
“The red one,” said Sirbat. Tsumo and I half dragged the Shiman over to a large red car with official markings. We laid Sirbat on the asphalt and tried the doors. Locked.
“Gorst’s opener, in here.” His clawed hand jerked upward. I retrieved the keys from his blouse, and opened the door. Somehow we managed to bundle Sirbat into the back seat.
I looked at Tsumo. “You know how to operate this contraption?”
Her eyes widened in dismay. Apparently she had never considered this flaw in our plans. “No, of course not. Do you?”
“Once upon a time, my dear,” I said, urging her into the passenger seat, “once upon a time.” I settled behind the wheel and slammed the door. These were the first mechanical controls I had seen in a long time, but they were grotesquely familiar. The steering wheel was less than thirty centimeters across. (I soon found it was only half a turn from lock to lock.) A clutch and shift assembly were mounted next to the wheel. With the help of Sirbat’s advice I started the engine and backed out of the parking stall.
The car’s triple headlights sent silver spears into the fog. It was difficult to see more than thirty meters into the murk. The only Shiman around was a half-eaten corpse on the sidewalk by the entrance to the parking lot. I eased the car into the street, and Sirbat directed me to the first turn.
This was almost worth the price of admission! It had been a long time since I’d driven any vehicle. The street we were on went straight to the river. I’ll bet we were making a hundred kilometers per hour before three blocks were passed.
“Go, go you—” the rest was unintelligible. Sirbat paused, then managed to say, “We’ll be stopped for sure if you keep driving like a sleepwalker.” The buildings on either side of the narrow street zipped by too fast to count. Ahead nothing was visible but the brilliant backglow from our headlights. How could a Shiman survive even two years if he drove faster than this? I swerved as something—a truck, I think—whipped out of a side street.

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