Vernor Vinge

THE BLABBER

Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Vernor Vinge now lives in San Diego, California, where he is an associate professor of math sciences at San Diego State University. He sold his first story, “Apartness,” to New Worlds in 1965; it immediately attracted a good deal of attention, was picked up for Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr’s collaborative World’s Best Science Fiction anthology the following year, and still strikes me as one of the strongest stories of that entire period, holding up well even in comparison with more famous stories also reprinted in that same anthology, such as Clarke’s “Sunjammer” or Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” Since this impressive debut, he has become a frequent contributor to Analog; he has also sold to Orbit, Far Frontiers, If, Stellar, and other markets. His novella “True Names” was a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards in 1981, his novel A Fire Upon the Deep, one of the most epic and sweeping of modern Space Operas, won him a Hugo Award in 1993, and these days Vinge is regarded as one of the best of the new breed of American “hard science” writers, along with people such as Charles Sheffield and Greg Bear.

Vinge is not a prolific writer, although the few stories he does produce usually have a strong impact on the field. “True Names,” for instance, is famous in Internet circles and among computer enthusiasts well outside of the usual limits of the genre, and is cited by some as having been the real progenitor of cyberpunk rather than William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” or Neuromancer. Certainly, at the very least, it can be said to have prefigured many of the tropes of “cyberspace” before Gibson got there, although it lacks the aesthetic/political “punk” flavor of Gibson’s work, as well as the intensely romantic and attractive archetype of the Gibson Hero, an alienated hacker/cowboy who must go down the Mean Streets of the future all alone—both elements which helped to make Gibson’s stuff the cult favorite that it became. “True Names” has an even better claim to being one of the first Virtual Reality stories and, as such, the progenitor of a host of “computer gaming/VR” stories that would follow in years to come.

Adventure elements have always been strong in Vinge’s work, from “Apartness” through such stories as “The Barbarian Princess,” “Gemstone,” and “Grimm’s World” (later expanded into the novel Tatja Grimm’s World), on to novels such as The Witling and A Fire Upon the Deep. Seldom has he—or anybody else—put everything together better, though, than in the fast-paced, colorful, highly inventive novella that follows, “The Blabber.” The influence of Robert A. Heinlein is strong and obvious here—in fact, the story is in part an undisguised homage to Heinlein’s The Star Beast, which novel is specifically invoked in the text—although traces of the influence of Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Charles Harness, and perhaps Roger Zelazny (whose influence shows up even more clearly in “True Names,” I think) can be discerned as well. Although consciously modeled on the plot of The Star Beast, Vinge does some exciting new things with this familiar story, as well as a lot of shrewd and radical new thinking about what interstellar societies would really be like, thinking that prefigures his well-known speculations about “The Singularity” (the point waiting ahead for us all where technological change speeds up to such a degree that society becomes incomprehensible even to the people living in it)—and thinking that would perhaps have as great an impact (although a largely unacknowledged one) on future Space Adventure stories as “True Names” had had on the Virtual Reality tale.

Vinge’s other books include the well-received novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, Hugo finalists, which have been released in an omnibus volume as Across Realtime, and two short-story collections, True Names and Other Dangers, and Threats and Other Promises. He has not published a new novel since A Fire Upon the Deep, but the current word is that a new novel entitled A Deepness in the Sky will be out soon. His fans wait eagerly for it—as do I.

 

 

Some dreams take a long time in dying. Some get a last-minute reprieve … and that can be even worse.

It was just over two klicks from the Elvis revival to the center of campus. Hamid Thompson took the long way, across the Barker’s stubbly fields and through the Old Subdivision. Certainly the Blabber preferred that route. She raced this way and that across Ham’s path, rooting at roach holes, and covertly watching the birds that swooped close on her seductive calls. As usual, her stalking was more for fun than food. When a bird came within striking distance, the Blab’s head would flick up, touching the bird with her nose, blasting it with a peal of human laughter. The Blab hadn’t taken this way in some time; all the birds in her regular haunts had wised up, and were no fun anymore.

When they reached the rock bluffs behind the subdivision, there weren’t any more roach holes, and the birds had become cautious. Now the Blab walked companionably beside him, humming in her own way: scraps of Elvis overlaid with months-old news commentary. She went a minute or two in silence … listening? Contrary to what her detractors might say, she could be both awake and silent for hours at a time—but even then Hamid felt an occasional buzzing in his head, or a flash of pain. The Blab’s tympana could emit across a two hundred kilohertz band, which meant that most of her mimicry was lost on human ears.

They were at the crest of the bluff. “Sit down, Blab. I want to catch my breath.” And look at the view … And decide what in heaven’s name I should do with you and with me.

The bluffs were the highest natural viewpoints in New Michigan province. The flatlands that spread around them were pocked with ponds, laced with creeks and rivers, the best farmland on the continent. From orbit, the original colonists could find no better. Water landings would have been easier, but they wanted the best odds on long-term survival. Thirty klicks away, half hidden by gray mist, Hamid could see the glassy streaks that marked the landing zone. The history books said it took three years to bring down the people and all the salvage from the greatship. Even now the glass was faintly radioactive, one cause for the migration across the isthmus to Westland.

Except for the forest around those landing strips, and the old university town just below the bluff, most everything in this direction was farmland, unending squares of brown and black and gray. The year was well into autumn and the last of the Earth trees had given up their colored leaves. The wind blowing across the plains was chill, leaving a crispness in his nose that promised snow someday soon. Halloween was next week. Halloween indeed. I wonder if in Man’s thirty thousand years, there has ever been a celebration of that holiday like we’ll be seeing next week. Hamid resisted the impulse to look back at Marquette. Ordinarily it was one of his favorite places: the planetary capital, population four hundred thousand, a real city. As a child, visiting Marquette had been like a trip to some far star system. But now reality had come, and the stars were so close … . Without turning, he knew the position of every one of the Tourist barges. They floated like colored balloons above the city, yet none massed less than a thousand tonnes. And those were their shuttles. After the Elvis revival, Halloween was the last big event on the Marquette leg of the Tour. Then they would be off to Westland, for more semi-fraudulent peeks at Americana.

Hamid crunched back in the dry moss that cushioned the rock. “Well, Blabber, what should I do? Should I sell you? We could both make it Out There if I did.”

The Blabber’s ears perked up. “Talk? Converse? Disgust?” She settled her forty kilo bulk next to him, and nuzzled her head against his chest. The purring from her foretympanum was like some transcendental cat. The sound was pink noise, buzzing through his chest and shaking the rock they sat on. There were few things she enjoyed more than a good talk with a peer. Hamid stroked her black and white pelt. “I said, should I sell you?”

The purring stopped, and for a moment the Blab seemed to give the matter thoughtful consideration. Her head turned this way and that, bobbing—a good imitation of a certain prof at the University. She rolled her big dark eyes at him, “Don’t rush me! I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” She licked daintily at the sleek fur at the base of her throat. And for all Hamid knew, she really seemed to try to understand … and sometimes she almost made sense. Finally she shut her mouth and began talking.

“Should I sell you? Should I sell you?” The intonation was still Hamid’s but she wasn’t imitating his voice. When they talked like this, she typically sounded like an adult human female (and a very attractive one, Hamid thought). It hadn’t always been that way. When she had been a pup and he a little boy, she’d sounded to him like another little boy. The strategy was clear: she understood the type of voice he most likely wanted to hear. Animal cunning? “Well,” she continued, “I know what I think. Buy, don’t sell. And always get the best price you can.”

She often came across like that: oracular. But he had known the Blab all his life. The longer her comment, the less she understood it. In this case … Ham remembered his finance class. That was before he got his present apartment, and the Blab had hidden under his desk part of the semester. (It had been an exciting semester for all concerned.) “Buy, don’t sell.” That was a quote, wasn’t it, from some nineteenth-century tycoon?

She blabbered on, each sentence having less correlation with the question. After a moment, Hamid grabbed the beast around the neck, laughing and crying at the same time. They wrestled briefly across the rocky slope, Hamid fighting at less than full strength, and the Blab carefully keeping her talons retracted. Abruptly he was on his back and the Blab was standing on his chest. She held his nose between the tips of her long jaws. “Say Uncle! Say Uncle!” she shouted.

The Blabber’s teeth stopped a couple of centimeters short of the end of her snout, but the grip was powerful; Hamid surrendered immediately. The Blab jumped off him, chuckling triumph, then grabbed his sleeve to help him up. He stood up, rubbing his nose gingerly. “Okay, monster, let’s get going.” He waved downhill, toward Ann Arbor Town.

“Ha, ha! For sure. Let’s get going!” The Blab danced down the rocks faster than he could hope to go. Yet every few seconds the creature paused an instant, checking that he was still following. Hamid shook his head, and started down. Damned if he was going to break a leg just to keep up with her. Whatever her homeworld, he guessed that winter around Marquette was the time of year most homelike for the Blab. Take her coloring: stark black and white, mixed in wide curves and swirls. He’d seen that pattern in pictures of ice pack seals. When there was snow on the ground, she was practically invisible.

She was fifty meters ahead of him now. From this distance, the Blab could almost pass for a dog, some kind of greyhound maybe. But the paws were too large, and the neck too long. The head looked more like a seal’s than a dog’s. Of course, she could bark like a dog. But then, she could also sound like a thunderstorm, and make something like human conversation—all at the same time. There was only one of her kind in all Middle America. This last week, he’d come to learn that her kind were almost as rare Out There. A Tourist wanted to buy her … and Tourists could pay with coin what Hamid Thompson had sought for more than half his twenty years.

Hamid desperately needed some good advice. It had been five years since he’d asked his father for help; he’d be damned if he did so now. That left the University, and Lazy Larry … .

 

By Middle American standards, Ann Arbor Town was ancient. There were older places: out by the landing zone, parts of Old Marquette still stood. School field trips to those ruins were brief—the prefab quonsets were mildly radioactive. And of course there was individual buildings in the present-day capital that went back almost to the beginning. But much of the University in Ann Arbor dated from just after those first permanent structures: the University had been a going concern for 190 years.

Something was up today, and it had nothing to do with Hamid’s problems. As they walked into town, a couple of police helicopters swept in from Marquette, began circling the school. On the ground, some of Ham’s favorite back ways were blocked off by University safety patrols. No doubt it was Tourist business. He might have to come in through the Main Gate, past the Math Building. Yuck. Even after ten years he loathed that place: his years as a supposed prodigy; his parents forcing him into math classes he just wasn’t bright enough to handle; the tears and anger at home, till he finally convinced them that he was not the boy they thought.

They walked around the Quad, Hamid oblivious to the graceful buttresses, the ivy that meshed stone walls into the flute trees along the street. That was all familiar … what was new was all the Federal cop cars. Clusters of students stood watching the cops, but there was no riot in the air. They just seemed curious. Besides, the Feds had never interfered on campus before.

“Keep quiet, okay?” Hamid muttered.

“Sure, sure.” The Blab scrunched her neck back, went into her doggie act. At one time they had been notorious on campus, but he had dropped out that summer, and people had other things on their minds today. They walked through the main gate without comment from students or cops.

The biggest surprise came when they reached Larry’s slummy digs at Morale Hall. Morale wasn’t old enough to be historic; it was old enough to be in decay. It had been an abortive experiment in brick construction. The clay had cracked and rotted, leaving gaps for vines and pests. By now it was more a reddish mound of rubble than a habitable structure. This was where the University Administration stuck tenured faculty in greatest disfavor; the Quad’s Forgotten Quarter … but not today. Today the cop cars were piled two deep in the parking areas, and there were shotgun-toting guards at the entrance!

Hamid walked up the steps. He had a sick feeling that Lazy Larry might be the hardest prof in the world to see today. On the other hand, working with the Tourists meant Hamid saw some of these security people every day.

“Your business, sir?” Unfortunately, the guard was no one he recognized.

“I need to see my advisor … Professor Fujiyama.” Larry had never been his advisor, but Hamid was looking for advice.

“Um.” The cop flicked on his throat mike. Hamid couldn’t hear much, but there was something about “that black and white off-planet creature.” Over the last twenty years, you’d have to have been living in a cave never to see anything about the Blabber.

A minute passed, and an older officer stepped through the doorway. “Sorry, son, Mr. Fujiyama isn’t seeing any students this week. Federal business.”

 

Somewhere a funeral dirge began playing. Hamid tapped the Blab’s forepaw with his foot; the music stopped abruptly. “Ma’am, it’s not school business.” Inspiration struck: why not tell something like the truth? “It’s about the Tourists and my Blabber.”

The senior cop sighed. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say. Okay, come along.” As they entered the dark hallway, the Blabber was chuckling triumph. Someday the Blab would play her games with the wrong people and get the crap beat out of her, but apparently today was not that day.

They walked down two flights of stairs. The lighting got even worse, half-dead fluorescents built into the acoustic tiling. In places the wooden stairs sagged elastically under their feet. There were no queues of students squatting before any of the doors, but the cops hadn’t cleared out the faculty: Hamid heard loud snoring from one of the offices. The Forgotten Quarter—Morale Hall in particular—was a strange place. The one thing the faculty here had in common was that they had been an unbearable pain in the neck to someone. That meant that both the most incompetent and the most brilliant were jammed into these tiny offices.

Larry’s office was in the sub-basement, at the end of a long hall. Two more cops flanked the doorway, but otherwise it was as Hamid remembered it. There was a brass nameplate: “Professor L. Lawrence Fujiyama, Department of Transhuman Studies.” Next to the nameplate, a sign boasted implausible office hours. In the center of the door was the picture of a piglet and the legend: “If a student appears to need help, then appear to give him some.”

The police officer stood aside as they reached the door; Hamid was going to have to get in under his own power. Ham gave the door a couple of quick knocks. There was the sound of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “What’s the secret password?” came Larry’s voice.

“Professor Fujiyama, I need to talk to—”

“That’s not it!” The door was slammed loudly in Hamid’s face.

The senior cop put her hand on Hamid’s shoulder. “Sorry, son. He’s done that to bigger guns than you.”

He shrugged off her hand. Sirens sounded from the black and white creature at his feet. Ham shouted over the racket, “Wait! It’s me, Hamid Thompson! From your Transhume 201.”

The door came open again. Larry stepped out, glanced at the cops, then looked down at the Blabber. “Well, why didn’t you say so? Come on in.” As Hamid and the Blab scuttled past him, Larry smiled innocently at the Federal officer. “Don’t worry, Susie, this is official business.”

Fujiyama’s office was long and narrow, scarcely an aisle between deep equipment racks. Larry’s students (those who dared these depths) doubted the man could have survived on Old Earth before electronic datastorage. There must be tonnes of junk squirreled away on those shelves. The gadgets stuck out this way and that into the aisle. The place was a museum—perhaps literally; one of Larry’s specialties was archeology. Most of the machines were dead, but here and there something clicked, something glowed. Some of the gadgets were Rube Goldberg jokes, some were early colonial prototypes … and a few were from Out There. Steam and water pipes covered much of the ceiling. The place reminded Hamid of the inside of a submarine.

At the back was Larry’s desk. The junk on the table was balanced precariously high: a display flat, a beautiful piece of night black statuary. In Transhume 201, Larry had described his theory of artifact management: Last-In-First-Out, and every year buy a clean bed sheet, date it, and lay it over the previous layer of junk on your desk. Another of Lazy Larry’s jokes, most had thought. But there really was a bed sheet peeking out from under the mess.

Shadows climbed sharp and deep from the lamp on Larry’s desk. The cabinets around him seemed to lean inwards. The open space between them was covered with posters. Those posters were one small reason Larry was down here: ideas to offend every sensible faction of society. A pile of … something … lay on the visitor’s chair. Larry slopped it onto the floor and motioned Hamid to sit.

“Sure, I remember you from Transhume. But why mention that? You own the Blabber. You’re Huss Thompson’s kid.” He settled back in his chair.

I’m not Huss Thompson’s kid! Aloud, “Sorry, that was all I could think to say. This is about my Blabber, though. I need some advice.”

“Ah!” Fujiyama gave his famous polliwog smile, somehow innocent and predatory at the same time. “You came to the right place. I’m full of it. But I heard you had quit school, gone to work at the Tourist Bureau.”

Hamid shrugged, tried not to seem defensive. “Yeah. But I was already a senior, and I know more American Thought and Lit than most graduates … and the Tourist caravan will only be here another half year. After that, how long till the next? We’re showing them everything I could imagine they’d want to see. In fact, we’re showing them more than there really is to see. It could be a hundred years before anyone comes down here again.”

“Possibly, possibly.”

“Anyway, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve met almost half the Tourists. But …” There were ten million people living on Middle America. At least a million had a romantic yearning to get Out There. At least ten thousand would give everything they owned to leave the Slow Zone, to live in a civilization that spanned thousands of worlds. For the last ten years, Middle America had known of the Caravan’s coming. Hamid had spent most of those years—half his life, all the time since he got out of math—preparing himself with the skills that could buy him a ticket Out.

Thousands of others had worked just as hard. During the last decade, every department of American Thought and Literature on the planet had been jammed to the bursting point. And more had been going on behind the scenes. The government and some large corporations had had secret programs that weren’t revealed till just before the Caravan arrived. Dozens of people had bet on the long shots, things that no one else thought the Outsiders might want. Some of those were fools: the world-class athletes, the chess masters. They could never be more than eighth rate in the vast populations of the Beyond. No, to get a ride you needed something that was odd … Out There. Besides the Old Earth angle, there weren’t many possibilities—though that could be approached in surprising ways: there was Gilli Weinberg, a bright but not brilliant ATL student. When the Caravan reached orbit, she bypassed the Bureau, announced herself to the Tourists as a genuine American cheerleader and premier courtesan. It was a ploy pursued less frankly and less successfully by others of both sexes. In Gilli’s case, it had won her a ticket Out. The big laugh was that her sponsor was one of the few non-humans in the Caravan, a Lothlrimarre slug who couldn’t survive a second in an oxygen atmosphere.

“I’d say I’m on good terms with three of the Outsiders. But there are at least five Tour Guides that can put on a better show. And you know the Tourists managed to revive four more corpsicles from the original Middle America crew. Those guys are sure to get tickets Out, if they want ’em.” Men and women who had been adults on Old Earth, two thousand light-years away and twenty thousand years ago. It was likely that Middle America had no more valuable export this time around. “If they’d just come a few years later, after I graduated … maybe made a name for myself.”

Larry broke into the self-pitying silence. “You never thought of using the Blabber as your ticket Out?”

“Off and on.” Hamid glanced down at the dark bulk that curled around his feet. The Blab was awfully quiet.

Larry noticed the look. “Don’t worry. She’s fooling with some ultrasound imagers I have back there.” He gestured at the racks behind Hamid, where a violet glow played hopscotch between unseen gadgets. The boy smiled, “We may have trouble getting her out of here.” He had several ultrasonic squawkers around the apartment, but the Blab rarely got to play with high-resolution equipment. “Yeah, right at the beginning, I tried to interest them in the Blab. Said I was her trainer. They lost interest as soon as they saw she couldn’t be native to Old Earth … . These guys are freaks, Professor! You could rain transhuman treasure on ‘em, and they’d call it spit! But give ’em Elvis Presley singing Bruce Springsteen and they build you a spaceport on Selene!”

Larry just smiled, the way he did when some student was heading for academic catastrophe. Hamid quieted, “Yeah, I know. There are good reasons for some of the strangeness.” Middle America had nothing that would interest anybody rational from Out There. They were stuck nine light-years inside the Slow Zone: commerce was hideously slow and expensive. Middle American technology was obsolete and—considering their location—it could never amount to anything competitive. Hamid’s unlucky world had only one thing going for it. It was a direct colony of Old Earth, and one of the first. Their greatship’s tragic flight had lasted twenty thousand years, long enough for the Earth to become a legend for much of humankind.

In the Beyond, there were millions of solar systems known to bear human-equivalent intelligences. Most of these could be in more or less instantaneous communication with one another. In that vastness humanity was a speck—perhaps four thousand worlds. Even on those, interest in a first-generation colony within the Slow Zone was near zero. But with four thousand worlds, that was enough: here and there was a rich eccentric, a historical foundation, a religious movement—all strange enough to undertake a twenty-year mission into the Slowness. So Middle America should be glad for these rare mixed nuts. Over the last hundred years there had been occasional traders and a couple of Tourists caravans. That commerce had raised the Middle American standard of living substantially. More important to many—including Hamid—it was almost their only peephole on the universe beyond the Zone. In the last century, two hundred Middle Americans had escaped to the Beyond. The early ones had been government workers, commissioned scientists. The Feds’ investment had not paid off: of all those who left, only five had returned. Larry Fujiyama and Hussein Thompson were two of those five.

“Yeah, I guess I knew they’d be fanatics. But most of them aren’t even much interested in accuracy. We make a big thing of representing twenty-first-century America. But we both know what that was like: heavy industry moving up to Earth orbit, five hundred million people still crammed into North America. At best what we have here is like mid-twentieth-century America—or even earlier. I’ve worked very hard to get our past straight. But except for a few guys I really respect, anachronism doesn’t seem to bother them. It’s like just being here with us is the big thing.”

Larry opened his mouth, seemed on the verge of providing some insight. Instead he smiled, shrugged. (One of his many mottos was, “If you didn’t figure it out yourself, you don’t understand it.”)

“So after all these months, where did you dig up the interest in the Blabber?”

“It was the slug, the guy running the Tour. He just mailed me that he had a party who wanted to buy. Normally, this guy haggles. He—wait, you know him pretty well, don’t you? Well, he just made a flat offer. A payoff to the Feds, transport for me to Lothlrimarre,” that was the nearest civilized system in the Beyond, “and some ftl privileges beyond that.”

“And you kiss your pet goodbye?”

“Yeah. I made a case for them needing a handler: me. That’s not just bluff, by the way. We’ve grown up together. I can’t imagine the Blab accepting anyone without lots of help from me. But they’re not interested. Now, the slug claims no harm is intended her, but … do you believe him?”

“Ah, the slug’s slime is generally clean. I’m sure he doesn’t know of any harm planned … and he’s straight enough to do at least a little checking. Did he say who wanted to buy?”

“Somebody—something named Ravna&Tines.” He passed Larry a flimsy showing the offer. Ravna&Tines had a logo: it looked like a stylized claw. “There’s no Tourist registered with that name.”

Larry nodded, copied the flimsy to his display flat: “I know. Well, let’s see … .” He puttered around for a moment. The display was a lecture model, with imaging on both sides. Hamid could see the other was searching internal Federal databases. Larry’s eyebrows rose. “Hmhm! Ravna&Tines arrived just last week. It’s not part of the Caravan at all.”

“A solitary trader …”

“Not only that. It’s been hanging out past the Jovians—at the slug’s request. The Federal space net got some pictures.” There was a fuzzy image of something long and wasp-waisted, typical of the Outsiders’ ramscoop technology. But there were strange fins—almost like the wings on a sailplane. Larry played some algorithmic game with the display and the image sharpened. “Yeah. Look at the aspect ratio on those fins. This guy is carrying high-performance ftl gear. No good down here of course, but hot stuff across an enormous range of environment …” he whistled a few bars of Nightmare Waltz. “I think we’re looking at a High Trader.”

Someone from the Transhuman Spaces.

Almost every university on Middle America had a Department of Transhuman Studies. Since the return of the five, it had been a popular thing to do. Yet most people considered it a joke. Transhume was generally the bastard child of Religious Studies and an Astro or Computer Science department, the dumping ground for quacks and incompetents. Lazy Larry had founded the department at Ann Arbor-and spent much class time eloquently proclaiming its fraudulence. Imagine, trying to study what lay beyond the Beyond! Even the Tourists avoided the topic. Transhuman Space existed—perhaps it included most of the universe—but it was a tricky, risky, ambiguous thing. Larry said that its reality drove most of the economics of the Beyond … but that all the theories about it were rumors at tenuous second hand. One of his proudest claims was that he raised Transhuman Studies to the level of palm reading.

Yet now … apparently a trader had arrived that regularly penetrated the Transhuman Reaches. If the government hadn’t sat on the news, it would have eclipsed the Caravan itself. And this was what wanted the Blab. Almost involuntarily, he reached down to pet the creature. “Y-you don’t think there could really be anybody transhuman on that ship?” An hour ago he had been agonizing about parting with the Blab; that might be nothing compared to what they really faced.

For a moment he thought Larry was going to shrug the question off. But the older man sighed. “If there’s anything we’ve got right it’s that no transhuman can think at these depths. Even in the Beyond, they’d die or fragment or maybe cyst. I think this Ravna&Tines must be a human-equivalent intellect, but it could be a lot more dangerous than the average Outsider … the tricks it would know, the gadgets it would have.” His voice drifted off; he stared at the forty-centimeter statue perched on his desk. It was lustrous green, apparently cut from a flawless block of jade. Green? Wasn’t it black a minute ago?

Larry’s gaze snapped up to Hamid. “Congratulations. Your problem is a lot more interesting than you thought. Why would any Outsider want the Blab, much less a High Trader?”

“ … Well, her kind must be rare. I haven’t talked to any Tourist who recognized the race.”

Lazy Larry just nodded. Space is deep. The Blab might be from somewhere else in the Slow Zone.

“When she was a pup, lots of people studied her. You saw the articles. She has a brain as big as a chimp, but most of it’s tied up in driving her tympana and processing what she hears. One guy said she’s the ultimate in verbal orientation—all mouth and no mind.”

“Ah! A student!”

Hamid ignored the Larryism. “Watch this.” He patted the Blab’s shoulder.

She was slow in responding; that ultrasound equipment must be fascinating. Finally she raised her head. “What’s up?” The intonation was natural, the voice a young woman’s.

“Some people think she’s just a parrot. She can play things back better than a high-fidelity recorder. But she also picks up favorite phrases, and uses them in different voices—and almost appropriately … . Hey, Blab. What’s that?” Hamid pointed at the electric heater that Larry had propped by his feet. The Blab stuck her head around the corner of the desk, saw the cherry glowing coils. This was not the sort of heater Hamid had in his apartment.

“What’s that … that …” The Blab extended her head curiously toward the glow. She was a bit too eager; her nose bumped the heater’s safety grid. “Hot!” She jumped back, her nose tucked into her neck fur, a foreleg extended toward the heater. “Hot! Hot!” She rolled onto her haunches, and licked tentatively at her nose. “Jeeze!” She gave Hamid a look that was both calculating and reproachful.

“Honest, Blab, I didn’t think you would touch it … . She’s going to get me for this. Her sense of humor extends only as far as ambushes, but it can be pretty intense.”

“Yeah. I remember the Zoo Society’s documentary on her.” Fujiyama was grinning broadly. Hamid had always thought that Larry and the Blab had kindred humors. It even seemed that the animal’s cackling became like the old man’s after she attended a couple of his lectures.

Larry pulled the heater back and walked around the desk. He hunched down to the Blab’s eye level. He was all solicitude now, and a good thing: he was looking into a mouth full of sharp teeth, and somebody was playing the Timebomb Song. After a moment, the music stopped and she shut her mouth. “I can’t believe there isn’t human equivalence hiding here somewhere. Really. I’ve had freshmen who did worse at the start of the semester. How could you get this much verbalization without intelligence to benefit from it?” He reached out to rub her shoulders. “You got sore shoulders, Baby? Maybe little hands ready to burst out?”

The Blab cocked her head. “I like to soar.”

Hamid had thought long about the Heinlein scenario; the science fiction of Old Earth was a solid part of the ATL curriculum. “If she is still a child, she’ll be dead before she grows up. Her bone calcium and muscle strength have deteriorated about as much as you’d expect for a thirty-year-old human.”

“Hm. Yeah. And we know she’s about your age.” Twenty. “I suppose she could be an ego frag. But most of those are brain-damaged transhumans, or obvious constructs.” He went back behind his desk, began whistling tunelessly. Hamid twisted uneasily in his chair. He had come for advice. What he got was news that they were in totally over their heads. He shouldn’t be surprised; Larry was like that. “What we need is a whole lot more information.”

“Well, I suppose I could flat-out demand the slug tell me more. But I don’t know how I can force any of the Tourists to help me.”

Larry waved breezily. “That’s not what I meant. Sure, I’ll ask the Lothlrimarre about it. But basically the Tourists are at the end of a nine light-year trip to nowhere. Whatever libraries they have are like what you would take on a South Seas vacation—and out of date, to boot … . And of course the federal government of Middle America doesn’t know what’s coming off to begin with. Heh, heh. Why else do they come to me when they’re really desperate? … No, what we need is direct access to library resourses Out There.”

He said it casually, as though he were talking about getting an extra telephone, not solving Middle America’s greatest problem. He smiled complacently at Hamid, but the boy refused to be drawn in. Finally, “Haven’t you wondered why the campus—Morale Hall, in particular—is crawling with cops?”

“Yeah.” Or I would have, if there weren’t lots else on my mind.

“One of the more serious Tourists—Skandr Vrinimisrinithan—brought along a genuine transhuman artifact. He’s been holding back on it for months, hoping he could get what he wants other ways. The Feds—I’ll give ’em this—didn’t budge. Finally he brought out his secret weapon. It’s in this room right now.”

Ham’s eyes were drawn to the stone carving (now bluish green) that sat on Larry’s desk. The old man nodded. “It’s an ansible.”

“Surely they don’t call it that!”

“No. But that’s what it is.”

“You mean, all these years, it’s been a lie that ftl won’t work in the Zone?” You mean I’ve wasted my life trying to suck up to these Tourists?

“Not really. Take a look at this thing. See the colors change. I swear its size and mass do, too. This is a real transhuman artifact. Not an intellect, of course, but not some human design manufactured in Transhuman space. Skandr claims—and I believe him—that no other Tourist has one.”

A transhuman artifact. Hamid’s fascination was tinged with fear. This was something one heard of in the theoretical abstract, in classes run by crackpots.

“Skandr claims this gadget is ‘aligned’ on the Lothlrimarre commercial outlet. From there we can talk to any registered address in the Beyond.”

“Instantaneously.” Hamid’s voice was very small.

“Near enough. It would take a while to reach the universal event horizon; there are some subtle limitations if you’re moving at relativistic speeds.”

“And the catch?”

Larry laughed. “Good man. Skandr admits to a few. This thing won’t work more than ten light years into the Zone. I’ll bet there aren’t twenty worlds in the Galaxy that could benefit from it—but we are definitely on one. The trick sucks enormous energy. Skandr says that running this baby will dim our sun by half a percent. Not noticeable to the guy in the street, but it could have long-term bad effects.” There was a short silence; Larry often did that after a cosmic understatement. “And from your standpoint, Hamid, there’s one big drawback. The mean bandwidth of this thing is just under a six bits per minute.”

“Huh? Ten seconds to send a single bit?”

“Yup. Skandr left three protocols at the Lothlrimarre end: ASCII, a Hamming map to a subset of English, and an AI scheme that guesses what you’d say if you used more bits. The first is Skandr’s idea of a joke, and I wouldn’t trust the third more than wishful thinking. But with the Hamming map, you could send a short letter—say five hundred English words—in a day. It’s full-duplex, so you might get a good part of your answer in that time. Neat, huh? Anyway, it beats waiting twenty years.”

Hamid guessed it would be the biggest news since first contact, one hundred years ago. “So … uh, why did they bring it to you, Professor?”

Larry looked around his hole of an office, smiling wider and wider. “Heh, heh. It’s true, our illustrious planetary president is one of the five; he’s been Out There. But I’m the only one with real friends in the Beyond. You see, the Feds are very leery of this deal. What Skandr wants in return is most of our zygote bank. The Feds banned any private sale of human zygotes. It was a big moral thing: ‘no unborn child sold into slavery or worse.’ Now they’re thinking of doing it themselves. They really want this ansible. But what if it’s a fake, just linked up to some fancy database on Skandr’s ship? Then they’ve lost some genetic flexibility, and maybe they’ve sold some kids into hell—and got nothing but a colorful trinket for their grief.

“So. Skandr’s loaned them the thing for a week, and the Feds loaned it to me—with close to carte blanche. I can call up old friends, exchange filthy jokes, let the sun go dim doing it. After a week, I report on whether the gadget is really talking to the Outside.”

Knowing you, “I bet you have your own agenda.”

“Sure. Till you showed up the main item was to check out the foundation that sponsors Skandr, see if they’re as clean as he says. Now … well, your case isn’t as important morally, but it’s very interesting. There should be time for both. I’ll use Skandr’s credit to do some netstalking, see if I can find anyone who’s heard of Blabbers, or this Ravna&Tines.”

Hamid didn’t have any really close friends. Sometimes he wondered if that was another penalty of his strange upbringing, or if he was just naturally unlikable. He had come to Fujiyama for help all right, but all he’d been expecting was a round of prickly questions that eventually brought him to some insight. Now he seemed to be on the receiving end of a favor of worldshaking proportions. It made him suspicious and very grateful all at once. He gabbled some words of abject gratitude.

Larry shrugged. “It’s no special problem for me. I’m curious, and this week I’ve got the means to satisfy my curiosity.” He patted the ansible. “There’s a real favor I can do though: so far, Middle America has been cheated occasionally, but no Outsider has used force against us. That’s one good thing about the Caravan system: it’s to the Tourists’ advantage to keep each other straight. Ravna&Tines may be different. If this is really a High Trader, it might just make a grab for what it wants. If I were you, I’d keep close to the Blabber … . And I’ll see if the slug will move one of the Tourist barges over the campus. If you stay in this area, not much can happen without them knowing.

“Hey, see what a help I am? I did nothing for your original question, and now you have a whole, ah, shipload of new things to worry about … .”

He leaned back, and his voice turned serious. “But I don’t have much to say about your original question, Hamid. If Ravna&Tines turn out to be decent, you’ll still have to decide for yourself about giving up the Blab. I bet every critter that thinks it thinks—even the transhumans—worry about how to do right for themselves and the ones they love. I—uh, oh damn! Why don’t you ask your pop, why don’t you ask Hussein about these things? The guy has been heartbroken since you left.”

Ham felt his face go red. Pop had never had much good to say about Fujiyama. Who’d have guessed the two would talk about him? If Hamid had known, he’d never have come here today. He felt like standing up, screaming at this old man to mind his own business. Instead, he shook his head and said softly, “It’s kind of personal.”

Larry looked at him, as if wondering whether to push the matter. One word, and Ham knew that all the pain would come pouring out. But after a moment, the old man sighed. He looked around the desk to where the Blab lay, eyeing the heater. “Hey, Blabber. You take good care of this kid.”

The Blab returned his gaze. “Sure, sure,” she said.

 

Hamid’s apartment was on the south side of campus. It was large and cheap, which might seem surprising so near the oldest university around, and just a few kilometers south of the planetary capital. The back door opened on kilometers of forested wilderness. It would be a long time before there was any land development immediately south of here. The original landing zones were just twenty klicks away. In a bad storm there might be a little hot stuff blown north. It might be only fifty percent of natural background radiation, but with a whole world to colonize, why spread towns toward the first landings?

Hamid parked the commons bicycle in the rack out front, and walked quietly around the building. Lights were on upstairs. There were the usual motorbikes of other tenants. Something was standing in back, at the far end of the building. Ah. A Halloween scarecrow.

He and the Blab walked back to his end. It was past twilight and neither moon was in the sky. The tips of his fingers were chilled to numbness. He stuck his hands in his pockets, and paused to look up. The starships of the Caravan were in synch orbit at this longitude. They formed a row of bright dots in the southern sky. Something dark, too regular to be a cloud hung almost straight overhead. That must be the protection Larry had promised.

“I’m hungry.”

“Just a minute and we’ll go in.”

“Okay.” The Blab leaned companionably against his leg, began humming. She looked fat now, but it was just her fur, all puffed out. These temperatures were probably the most comfortable for her. He stared across the star fields. God, how many hours have I stood like this, wondering what all those stars mean? The Big Square was about an hour from setting. The fifth brightest star in that constellation was Lothlrimarre’s sun. At Lothlrimarre and beyond, faster than light travel was possible—even for twenty-first-century Old Earth types. If Middle America were just ten more light years farther out from the galactic center, Hamid would have had all the Beyond as his world.

His gaze swept back across the sky. Most everything he could see there would be in the Slow Zone. It extended four thousand light years inward from here, if the Outsiders were to be believed. Billions of star systems, millions of civilizations—trapped. Most would never know about the outside.

Even the Outsiders had only vague information about the civilizations down here in the Slow Zone. Greatships, ramscoops, they all must be invented here again and again. Colonies spread, knowledge gained, most often lost in the long slow silence. What theories the Slow Zone civilizations must have for why nothing could move faster than light—even in the face of superluminal events seen at cosmic distances. What theories they must have to explain why human-equivalent intelligence was the highest ever found and ever created. Those ones deep inside, they might at times be the happiest of all, their theories assuring them they were at the top of creation. If Middle America were only a hundred light years further down, Hamid would never know the truth. He would love this world, and the spreading of civilization upon it.

Hamid’s eye followed the Milky Way to the western horizon. The glow wasn’t really brighter there than above, but he knew his constellations. He was looking at the galactic center. He smiled wanly. In twentieth-century science fiction, those star clouds were imagined as the homes of “elder races,” godlike intellects … . But the Tourists call those regions of the galaxy, the Depths. The Unthinking Depths. Not only was ftl impossible there, but so was sentience. So they guessed. They couldn’t know for sure. The fastest round-trip probe to the edge of the Depths took about ten thousand years. Such expeditions were rare, though some were well documented.

Hamid shivered, and looked back at the ground. Four cats sat silently just beyond the lawn, watching the Blab. “Not tonight, Blab,” he said, and the two of them went indoors.

The place looked undisturbed: the usual mess. He fixed the Blab her dinner and heated some soup for himself.

“Yuck. This stuff tastes like shit!” The Blab rocked back on her haunches and made retching sounds. Few people have their own childhood obnoxiousness come back to haunt them so directly as Hamid Thompson did. He could remember using exactly those words at the dinner table. Mom should have stuffed a sock down his throat.

Hamid glanced at the chicken parts. “Best we can afford, Blab.” He was running his savings down to zero to cover the year of the Tourists. Being a guide was such a plum that no one thought to pay for it.

“Yuck.” But she started nibbling.

As Ham watched her eat, he realized that one of his problems was solved. If Ravna&Tines wouldn’t take him as the Blab’s “trainer,” they could hike back to the Beyond by themselves. Furthermore, he’d want better evidence from the slug—via the ansible he could get assurances directly from Lothlrimarre—that Ravna&Tines could be held to promises. The conversation with Larry had brought home all the nightmare fears, the fears that drove some people to demand total rejection of the Caravan. Who knew what happened to those that left with Outsiders? Almost all Middle American knowledge of the Beyond came from less than thirty starships, less than a thousand strangers. Strange strangers. If it weren’t for the five who came back, there would be zero corroboration. Of those five … well, Hussein Thompson was a mystery even to Hamid: seeming kind, inside a vicious mercenary. Lazy Larry was a mystery, too, a cheerful one who made it clear that you better think twice about what folks tell you. But one thing came clear from all of them: space is deep. There were millions of civilized worlds in the Beyond, thousands of star-spanning empires. In such vastness, there could be no single notion of law and order. Cooperation and enlightened self-interest were common, but … nightmares lurked.

So what if Ravna&Tines turned him down, or couldn’t produce credible assurances? Hamid went into the bedroom, and punched up the news, let the color and motion wash over him. Middle America was a beautiful world, still mostly empty. With the agrav plates and the room-temperature fusion electrics that the Caravan had brought, life would be more exciting here then ever before … . In twenty or thirty years there would likely be another caravan. If he and the Blab were still restless—well, there was plenty of time to prepare. Larry Fujiyama had been forty years old when he went Out.

Hamid sighed, happy with himself for the first time in days.

 

 

The phone rang just as he finished with the news. The name of the incoming caller danced in red letters across the news display: Ravna. No location or topic. Hamid swallowed hard. He bounced off the bed, turned the phone pickup to look at a chair in an uncluttered corner of the room, and sat down there. Then he accepted the call.

Ravna was human. And female. “Mr. Hamid Thompson, please.”

“T-that’s me.” Curse the stutter.

For an instant there was no reaction. Then a quick smile crossed her face. It was not a friendly smile, more like a sneer at his nervousness. “I call to discuss the animal. The Blabber, you call it. You have heard our offer. I am prepared to improve upon it.” As she spoke, the Blab walked into the room and across the phone’s field of view. Her gaze did not waver. Strange. He could see that the video transmit light was on next to the screen. The Blab began to hum. A moment passed and then she reacted, a tiny start of surprise.

“What is your improvement?”

Again, a half-second pause. Ravna&Tines were a lot nearer than the Jovians tonight, though apparently still not at Middle America. “We possess devices that allow faster than light communication to a world in the … Beyond. Think on what this access means. With this, if you stay on Middle America, you will be the richest man on the planet. If you choose to accept passage Out, you will have the satisfaction of knowing you have moved your world a good step out of the darkness.”

Hamid found himself thinking faster than he ever had outside of a Fujiyama oral exam. There were plenty of clues here. Ravna’s English was more fluent than most Tourists’, but her pronunciation was awful. Human but awful: her vowel stress was strange to the point of rendering her speech unintelligible, and she didn’t voice things properly: “pleess” instead “pleez,” “chooss” instead of “chooz.”

At the same time, he had to make sense of what she was saying and decide the correct response. Hamid thanked God he already knew about ansibles. “Miss Ravna, I agree. That is an improvement. Nevertheless, my original requirement stands. I must accompany my pet. Only I know her needs.” He cocked his head. “You could do worse than have an expert on call.”

As he spoke, her expression clouded. Rage? She seemed hostile toward him personally. But when he finished, her face was filled with an approximation of a friendly smile. “Of course, we will arrange that also. We had not realized earlier how important this is to you.”

Jeeze. Even I can lie better than that! This Ravna was used to getting her own way without face-to-face lies, or else she had real emotional problems. Either way: “And since you and I are scarcely equals, we also need to work something out with the Lothlrimarre that will put a credible bond on the agreement.”

Her poorly constructed mask slipped. “That is absurd.” She looked at something off camera. “The Lothlrimarre knows nothing of us … . I will try to satisfy you. But know this, Hamid Thompson: I am the congenial, uh, humane member of my team. Mr. Tines is very impatient. I try to restrain him, but if he becomes enough desperate … things could happen that would hurt us all. Do you understand me?”

First a lie, and now chainsaw subtlety. He fought back a smile. Careful. You might be mistaking raw insanity for bluff and bluster. “Yes, Miss Ravna, I do understand, and your offer is generous. But … I need to think about this. Can you give me a bit more time?” Enough time to complain to the Tour Director.

“Yes. One hundred hours should be feasible.”

After she rang off, Hamid sat for a long time, staring sightlessly at the dataset. What was Ravna? Through twenty thousand years of colonization, on worlds far stranger than Middle America, the human form had drifted far. Cross fertility existed between most of Earth’s children, though they differed more from one another than had races on the home planet. Ravna looked more like an Earth human than most of the Tourists. Assuming she was of normal height, she could almost have passed as an American of Middle East descent: sturdy, dark-skinned, black-haired. There were differences. Her eyes had epicanthic folds, and the irises were the most intense violet he had ever seen. Still, all that was trivial compared to her manner.

Why hadn’t she been receiving Hamid’s video? Was she blind? She didn’t seem so otherwise; he remembered her looking at things around her. Perhaps she was some sort of personality simulator. That had been a standard item in American science fiction at the end of the twentieth century; the idea passed out of fashion when computer performance seemed to top out in the early twenty-first. But things like that should be possible in the Beyond, and certainly in Transhuman Space. They wouldn’t work very well down here, of course. Maybe she was just a graphical front end for whatever Mr. Tines was.

Somehow, Hamid thought she was real. She certainly had a human effect on him. Sure she had a good figure, obvious under soft white shirt and pants. And sure, Hamid had been girl crazy the last five years. He was so horny most of the time, it felt good just to ogle femikins in downtown Marquette stores. But for all-out sexiness, Ravna wasn’t that spectacular. She had nothing on Gilli Weinberg or Skandr Vrinimisrinithan’s wife. Yet, if he had met her at school, he would have tried harder to gain her favor than he had Gilli’s … and that was saying a lot.

Hamid sighed. That probably just showed that he was nuts.

“I wanna go out.” The Blab rubbed her head against his arm. Hamid realized he was sweating even though the room was chill.

“God, not tonight, Blab.” He realized that there was a lot of bluff in Ravna & Tines. At the same time, it was clear they were the kind who might just grab if they could get away with it.

“I wanna go out!” Her voice came louder. The Blab spent many nights outside, mainly in the forest. That made it easier to keep her quiet when she was indoors. For the Blab, that was a chance to play with her pets: the cats—and sometimes the dogs—in the neighborhood. There had been a war when he and the Blab first arrived here. Pecking orders had been abruptly revised, and two of the most ferocious dogs had just disappeared. What was left was very strange. The cats were fascinated by the Blab. They hung around the yard just for a glimpse of her. When she was here they didn’t even fight among themselves. Nights like tonight were the best. In a couple of hours both Selene and Diana would rise, the silver moon and the gold. On nights like this, when gold and silver lay between deep shadows, Hamid had seen her pacing through the edge of the forest, followed by a dozen faithful retainers.

But, “Not tonight, Blab!” There followed a major argument, the Blabber blasting rock music and kiddie shows at high volume. The noise wasn’t the loudest she could make. That would have been physically painful to Ham. No, this was more like a cheap music player set way high. Eventually it would bring complaints from all over the apartment building. Fortunately for Hamid, the nearest rooms were unoccupied just now.

After twenty minutes of din, Hamid twisted the fight into a “game of humans.” Like many pets, the Blab thought of herself as a human being. But unlike a cat or a dog or even a parrot, she could do a passable job of imitating one. The trouble was, she couldn’t always find people with the patience to play along.

They sat across from each other at the dinette table, the Blab’s forelegs splayed awkwardly across its surface. Hamid would start with some question—it didn’t matter the topic. The Blab would nod wisely, ponder a reply. With most abstractions, anything she had to say was nonsense, meaningful only to tea-leaf readers or wishful thinkers. Never mind that. In the game, Hamid would respond with a comment, or laugh if the Blab seemed to be in a joke-telling behavior. The pacing, the intonation—they were all perfect for real human dialog. If you didn’t understand English, the game would have sounded like two friends having a good time.

“How about an imitation, Blab? Joe Ortega. President Ortega. Can you do that?”

“Heh, heh.” That was Lazy Larry’s cackle. “Don’t rush me. I’m thinking. I’m thinking!” There were several types of imitation games. For instance, she could speak back Hamid’s words instantly, but with the voice of some other human. Using that trick on a voice-only phone was probably her favorite game of all, since her audience really believed she was a person. What he was asking for now was almost as much fun, if the Blab would play up to it.

She rubbed her jaw with a talon, “Ah yes.” She sat back pompously, almost slid onto the floor before she caught herself. “We must all work together in these exciting times.” That was from a recent Ortega speech, a simple playback. But even when she got going, responding to Hamid’s questions, adlibbing things, she was still a perfect match for the President of Middle America. Hamid laughed and laughed. Ortega was one of the five who came back, not a very bright man but self-important and ambitious. It said something that even his small knowledge of the Outside was enough to propel him to the top of the world state. The five were very big fish in a very small pond—that was how Larry Fujiyama put it.

The Blab was an enormous show-off, and was quickly carried away by her own wit. She began waving her forelegs around, lost her balance and fell off the chair. “Oops!” She hopped back on the chair, looked at Hamid—and began laughing herself. The two were in stitches for almost half a minute. This had happened before; Hamid was sure the Blab could not appreciate humor above the level of pratfalls. Her laughter was imitation for the sake of congeniality, for the sake of being a person. “Oh, God!” She flopped onto the table, “choking” with mirth, her forelegs across the back of her neck as if to restrain herself.

The laughter died away to occasional snorts, and then a companionable silence. Hamid reached across to rub the bristly fur that covered the Blab’s forehead tympanum. “You’re a good kid, Blab.”

The dark eyes opened, turned up at him. Something like a sigh escaped her, buzzing the fur under his palm. “Sure, sure,” she said.

 

Hamid left the drapes partly pulled, and a window pane cranked open where the Blab could sit and look out. He lay in the darkened bedroom and watched her silhouette against the silver and gold moonlight. She had her nose pressed up to the screen. Her long neck was arched to give both her head and shoulder tympana a good line on the outside. Every so often her head would jerk a few millimeters, as if something very interesting had just happened outside.

The loudest sound in the night was faint roach racket, out by the forest. The Blab was being very quiet—in the range Hamid could hear—and he was grateful. She really was a good kid.

He sighed and pulled the covers up to his nose. It had been a long day, one where life’s problems had come out ahead.

He’d be very careful the next few days; no trips away from Marquette and Ann Arbor, no leaving the Blab unattended. At least the slug’s protection looked solid. I better tell Larry about the second ansible, though. If Ravna&Tines just went direct to the government with it … that might be the most dangerous move of all. For all their pious talk and restrictions on private sales, the Feds would sell their own grandmothers if they thought it would benefit the Planetary Interest. Thank God they already had an ansible—or almost had one.

Funny. After all these years and all the dreams, that it was the Blab the Outsiders were after … .

Hamid was an adopted child. His parents had told him that as soon as he could understand the notion. And somewhere in those early years, he had guessed the truth … that his father had brought him in … from the Beyond. Somehow Huss Thompson had kept that fact secret from the public. Surely the government knew, and cooperated with him. In those early years—before they forced him into Math—it had been a happy secret for him; he thought he had all his parents’ love. Knowing that he was really from Out There had just given substance to what most well-loved kids believe anyway—that somehow they are divinely special. His secret dream had been that he was some Outsider version of an exiled prince. And when he grew up, when the next ships from the Beyond came down … he would be called to his destiny.

Starting college at age eight had just seemed part of that destiny. His parents had been so confident of him, even though his tests results were scarcely more than bright normal … . That year had been the destruction of innocence. He wasn’t a genius, no matter how much his parents insisted. The fights, the tears, their insistence. In the end, Mom had left Hussein Thompson. Not till then did the man relent, let his child return to normal schools. Life at home was never the same. Mom’s visits were brief, tense … and rare. But it wasn’t for another five years that Hamid learned to hate his father. The learning had been an accident, a conversation overheard. Hussein had been hired to raise Hamid as he had, to push him into school, to twist and ruin him. The old man had never denied the boy’s accusations. His attempts to “explain” had been vague mumbling … worse than lies … . If Hamid was a prince, he must be a very hated one indeed.

The memories had worn deep grooves, ones he often slid down on his way to sleep … . But tonight there was something new, something ironic to the point of magic. All these years … it had been the Blab who was the lost princeling … !

 

There was a hissing sound. Hamid struggled toward wakefulness, fear and puzzlement playing through his dreams. He rolled to the edge of the bed and forced his eyes to see. Only stars shone through the window. The Blab. She wasn’t sitting at the window screen anymore. She must be having one of her nightmares. They were rare, but spectacular. One winter’s night Hamid had been wakened by the sounds of a full-scale thunderstorm. This was not so explosive, but …

He looked across the floor at the pile of blankets that was her nest. Yes. She was there, and facing his way.

“Blab? It’s okay, baby.”

No reply. Only the hissing, maybe louder now. It wasn’t coming from the Blab. For an instant his fuzzy mind hung in a kind of mouse-and-snake paralysis. Then he flicked on the lights. No one here. The sound was from the dataset; the picture flat remained dark. This is crazy.

“Blab?” He had never seen her like this. Her eyes were open wide, rings of white showing around the irises. Her forelegs reached beyond the blankets. The talons were extended and had slashed deep into the plastic flooring. A string of drool hung from her muzzle.

He got up, started toward her. The hissing formed a voice, and the voice spoke. “I want her. Human, I want her. And I will have her.” Her, the Blab.

“How did you get access? You have no business disturbing us.” Silly talk, but it broke the nightmare spell of this waking.

“My name is Tines.” Hamid suddenly remembered the claw on the Ravna&Tines logo. Tines. Cute. “We have made generous offers. We have been patient. That is past. I will have her. If it means the death of all you m-meat animals, so be it. But I will have her.”

The hissing was almost gone now, but the voice still sounded like something from a cheap synthesizer. The syntax and accent were similar to Ravna’s. They were either the same person, or they had learned English from the same source. Still, Ravna had seemed angry. Tines sounded flat-out nuts. Except for the single stutter over “meat,” the tone and pacing were implacable. And that voice gave away more than anything yet about why the Outsider wanted his pet. There was a hunger in its voice, a lust to feed or to rape.

Hamid’s rage climbed on top of his fear. “Why don’t you just go screw yourself, comic monster! We’ve got protection, else you wouldn’t come bluffing—”

“Bluffing! Bluffiiyowru—” the words turned into choked gobbling sounds. Behind him, Hamid heard the Blab scream. After a moment the noises faded. “I do not bluff. Hussein Thompson has this hour learned what I do with those who cross me. You and all your people will also die unless you deliver her to me. I see a ground car parked by your … house. Use it to take her east fifty kilometers. Do this within one hour, or learn what Hussein Thompson learned—that I do not bluff.” And Mr. Tines was gone.

It has to be a bluff? If Tines has that power why not wipe the Tourists from the sky and just grab the Blab? Yet they were so stupid about it. A few smooth lies a week ago, and they might have gotten everything without a murmur. It was as if they couldn’t imagine being disobeyed—or were desperate beyond reason.

Hamid turned back to the Blab. As he reached to stroke her neck, she twisted, her needle-toothed jaws clicking shut on his pyjama sleeve. “Blab!”

She released his sleeve, and drew back into the pile of blankets. She was making whistling noises like the time she got hit by a pickup trike. Hamid’s father guessed those must be true Blabber sounds, like human sobs or chattering of teeth. He went to his knees and made comforting noises. This time she let him stroke her neck. He saw that she had wet her bed. The Blab had been toilet trained as long as he had. Bluff or not, this had thoroughly terrified her. Tines claimed he could kill everyone. Hamid remembered the ansible, a god-damned telephone that could dim the sun.

Bluff or madness?

He scrambled back to his dataset, and punched up the Tour Director’s number. Pray the slug was accepting more than mail tonight. The ring pattern flashed twice, and then he was looking at a panorama of cloud tops and blue sky. It might have been an aerial view of Middle America, except that as you looked downwards the clouds seemed to extend forever, more and more convoluted in the dimness. This was a picture clip from the ten-bar level over Lothlrimarre. No doubt the slug chose it to soothe human callers, and still be true to the nature of his home world—a subjovian thirty thousand kilometers across.

For five seconds they soared through the canyons of cloud. Wake up, damn you!

The picture cleared and he was looking at a human—Larry Fujiyama! Lazy Larry did not look surprised to see him. “You got the right number, kid. I’m up here with the slug. There have been developments.”

Hamid gaped for an appropriate reply, and the other continued. “Ravna&Tines have been all over the slug since about midnight. Threats and promises, mostly threats since the Tines critter took their comm … . I’m sorry about your dad, Hamid. We should’ve thought to—”

“What?”

“Isn’t that what you’re calling about? … Oh. It’s been on the news. Here—” The picture dissolved into a view from a news chopper flying over eastern Michigan farmland. It took Hamid a second to recognize the hills. This was near the Thompson spread, two thousand klicks east of Marquette. It would be past sunup there. The camera panned over a familiar creek, the newsman bragging how On-Line News was ahead of the first rescue teams. They crested a range of hills and … where were the trees? Thousands of black lines lay below, trunks of blown-over trees, pointing inevitably inward, toward the center of the blast. The newsman babbled on about the meteor strike and how fortunate it was that ground zero was in a lake valley, how only one farm had been affected. Hamid swallowed. That farm … was Hussein Thompson’s. The place they lived after Mom left. Ground zero itself was obscured by rising steam—all that was left of the lake. The reporter assured his audience that the crater consumed all the land where the farm buildings had been.

The news clip vanished. “It was no Middle American nuke, but it wasn’t natural, either,” said Larry. “A lighter from Ravna&Tines put down there two hours ago. Just before the blast, I got a real scared call from Huss, something about ‘the tines’ arriving. I’ll show it to you if—”

“No!” Hamid gulped. “No,” he said more quietly. How he had hated Hussein Thompson; how he had loved his father in the years before. Now he was gone, and Hamid would never get his feelings sorted out. “Tines just called me. He said he killed my—Hussein.” Hamid played back the call. “Anyway, I need to talk to the slug. Can he protect me? Is Middle America really in for it if I refuse the Tines thing?”

For once Larry didn’t give his “you figure it” shrug. “It’s a mess,” he said. “And sluggo’s waffling. He’s around here somewhere. Just a sec—” More peaceful cloud-soaring. Damn, damn, damn. Something bumped gently into the small of his back. The Blab. The black and white neck came around his side. The dark eyes looked up at him. “What’s up?” she said quietly.

Hamid felt like laughing and crying. She was very subdued, but at least she recognized him now. “Are you okay, Baby?” he said. The Blabber curled up around him, her head stretched out on his knee.

On the dataset, the clouds parted and they were looking at both Larry Fujiyama and the slug. Of course, they were not in the same room; that would have been fatal to both. The Lothlrimarre barge was a giant pressure vessel. Inside, pressure and atmosphere were just comfy for the slug—about a thousand bars of ammonia and hydrogen. There was a terrarium for human visitors. The current view showed the slug in the foreground. Part of the wall behind him was transparent, a window into the terrarium. Larry gave a little wave, and Hamid felt himself smiling. No question who was in a zoo.

“Ah, Mr. Thompson. I’m glad you called. We have a very serious problem.” The slug’s English was perfect, and though the voice was artificial, he sounded like a perfectly normal Middle American male. “Many problems would be solved if you could see your way clear to give—”

“No.” Hamid’s voice was flat. “N-not while I’m alive, anyway. This is no business deal. You’ve heard the threats, and you saw what they did to my father.” The slug had been his ultimate employer these last six months, someone rarely spoken to, the object of awe. None of that mattered now. “You’ve always said the first responsibility of the Tour Director is to see that no party is abused by another. I’m asking you to live up to that.”

“Um. Technically, I was referring to you Middle Americans and the Tourists in my caravan. I know I have the power to make good on my promises with them … . But we’re just beginning to learn about Ravna&Tines. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to stand up against them.” He swiveled his thousand-kilo bulk toward the terrarium window. Hamid knew that under Lothlrimarre gravity, the slug would have been squashed into the shape of a flatworm, with his manipulator fringe touching the ground. At one gee, he looked more like an overstuffed silk pillow, fringed with red tassles. “Larry has told me about Skandr’s remarkable Slow Zone device. I’ve heard of such things. They are very difficult to obtain. A single one would have more than financed my caravan … . And to think that Skandr pleaded his foundation’s poverty in begging passage … . Anyway, Larry has been using the ‘ansible’ to ask about what your Blabber really is.”

Larry nodded. “Been at it since you left, Hamid. The machine’s down in my office, buzzing away. Like Skandr says, it is aligned on the commercial outlet at Lothlrimarre. From there I have access to the Known Net. Heh, heh. Skandr left a sizable credit bond at Lothlrimarre. I hope he and Ortega aren’t too upset by the phone bill I run up testing this gadget for them. I described the Blab, and put out a depth query. There are a million subnets, all over the Beyond, searching their databases for anything like the Blab. I—” His happy enthusiasm wavered, “Sluggo thinks we’ve dug up a reference to the Blabber’s race … .”

“Yes, and it’s frightening, Mr. Thompson.” It was no surprise that none of the Tourists had heard of a blabber. The only solid lead coming back to Larry had been from halfway around the galactic rim, a nook in the Beyond that had only one occasional link with the rest of the Known Net. That far race had no direct knowledge of the Blabbers. But they heard rumors. From a thousand light-years below them, deep within the Slow Zone, there came stories … of a race matching the Blab’s appearance. The race was highly intelligent, and had quickly developed the relativistic transport that was the fastest thing inside the Zone. They colonized a vast sphere, held an empire of ten thousand worlds—all without ftl. And the tines—the name seemed to fit—had not held their empire through the power of brotherly love. Races had been exterminated, planets busted with relativistic kinetic energy bombs. The tines’ technology had been about as advanced and deadly as could exist in the Zone. Most of their volume was a tomb now, their story whispered through centuries of slow flight toward the Outside.

“Wait, wait. Prof Fujiyama told me the ansible’s bandwidth is a tenth of a bit per second. You’ve had less than twelve hours to work this question. How can you possibly know all this?”

Larry looked a little embarrassed—a first as far as Hamid could remember. “We’ve been using the AI protocol I told you about. There’s massive interpolation going on at both ends of our link to Lothlrimarre.”

“I’ll bet!”

“Remember, Mr. Thompson, the data compression applies only to the first link in the chain. The Known Net lies in the Beyond. Bandwidth and data integrity are very high across most of its links.”

The slug sounded very convinced. But Hamid had read a lot about the Known Net; the notion was almost as fascinating as ftl travel itself. There was no way a world could have a direct link with all others—partly because of range limitations, mainly because of the number of planets involved. Similarly, there was no way a single “phone company” (or even ten thousand phone companies!) could run the thing. Most likely, the information coming to them from around the galaxy had passed through five or ten intermediate hops. The intermediates—not to mention the race on the far rim—were likely nonhuman. Imagine asking a quesiton in English to someone who also speaks Spanish, and that person asking the question in Spanish to someone who understands Spanish and passes the question on in German. This was a million times worse. Next to some of the creatures Out There, the slug could pass for human!

Hamid said as much. “F-furthermore, even if this is what the sender meant, it could still be a lie! Look at what local historians did to Richard the Third, or Mohamet Rose.”

Lazy Larry smiled his polliwog smile, and Hamid realized they must have been arguing about this already. Larry put in, “There’s also this, sluggo: the nature of the identification. The tines must have something like hands. See any on Hamid’s Blabber?”

The slug’s scarlet fringe rippled three quick cycles. Agitation? Dismissal? “The text is still coming in. But I have a theory. You know, Larry, I’ve always been a great student of sex. I may be a ‘he’ only by courtesy, but I think sex is fascinating. It’s what makes the ‘world go around’ for so many races.” Hamid suddenly understood Gilli Weinberg’s success. “So. Grant me my expertise. My guess is the tines exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism. The males’ forepaws probably are hands. No doubt it’s the males who are the killers. The females—like the Blab—are by contrast friendly, mindless creatures.”

The Blab’s eyes rolled back to look at Hamid. “Sure, sure,” she murmured. The accident of timing was wonderful, seeming to say who is this clown?

The slug didn’t notice. “This may even explain the viciousness of the male. Think back to the conversation Mr. Thompson had. These creatures seem to regard their own females as property to exploit. Rather the ultimate in sexism.” Hamid shivered. That did ring a bell. He couldn’t forget the hunger in the tines’s voice.

“Is this the long way to tell me you’re not going to protect us?”

The slug was silent for almost fifteen seconds. Its scarlet fringe waved up and down the whole time. Finally: “Almost, I’m afraid. My caravan customers haven’t heard this analysis, just the threats and the news broadcasts. Nevertheless, they are tourists, not explorers. They demand that I refuse to let you aboard. Some demand that we leave your planet immediately … . How secure is this line, Larry?”

Fujiyama said, “Underground fiberoptics, and an encrypted laser link. Take a chance, sluggo.”

“Very well. Mr. Thompson, there is what you can expect from me: I can stay over the city, and probably defend against direct kidnapping—that unless I see a planetbuster coming. I doubt very much they have that set up, but if they do—well, I don’t think even you would want to keep your dignity at the price of a relativistic asteroid strike.

“I can not come down to pick you up. That would be visible to all, a direct violation of my customers’ wishes. On the other hand,” there was another pause, and his scarlet fringe whipped about even faster than before, “if you should appear, uh, up here, I would take you aboard my barge. Even if this were noticed, it would be a fait accompli. I could hold off my customers, and likely our worst fate would be a premature and unprofitable departure from Middle America.”

“T-that’s very generous.” Unbelievably so. The slug was thought to be an honest fellow—but a very hard trader. Even Hamid had to admit that the claim on the slug’s honor was tenuous here, yet he was risking a twenty-year mission for it.

“Of course, if we reach that extreme, I’ll want a few years of your time once we reach the Outside. My bet is that hard knowledge about your Blabber might make up for the loss of everything else.”

A day ago, Hamid would have quibbled about contracts and assurances. Today, well, the alternative was Ravna&Tines … . With Larry as witness, they settled on two years indenture and a pay scale.

Now all he and the Blab had to do was figure how to climb five thousand meters straight up. There was one obvious way:

 

 

It was Dave Larson’s car, but Davey owed him. Hamid woke his neighbor, explained that the Blab was sick and had to go into Marquette. Fifteen minutes later, Hamid and the Blab were driving through Ann Arbor Town. It was a Saturday, and barely into morning twilight; he had the road to himself. He’d half expected the place to be swarming with cops and military. If Ravna&Tines ever guessed how easy it was to intimidate Joe Ortega … If the Feds knew exactly what was going on, they’d turn the Blab over to Tines in an instant. But apparently the government was simply confused, lying low, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed till the big boys upstairs settled their arguments. The farm bombing wasn’t in the headline list anymore. The Feds were keeping things quiet, thereby confining the mindless panic to the highest circles of government.

The Blab rattled around the passenger side of the car, alternately leaning on the dash and sniffing in the bag of tricks that Hamid had brought. She was still subdued, but riding in a private auto was a novelty. Electronics gear was cheap, but consumer mechanicals were still at a premium. And without a large highway system, cars would never be the rage they had been on Old Earth; most freight transport was by rail. A lot of this would change because of the Caravan. They brought one hundred thousand agrav plates—enough to revolutionize transport. Middle America would enter the Age of the Aircar—and for the first time surpass the homeworld. So saith Joe Ortega.

Past the University, there was a patch of open country. Beyond the headlights, Hamid caught glimpses of open fields, a glint of frost. Hamid looked up nervously every few seconds. Selene and Diana hung pale in the west. Scattered clouds floated among the Tourist barges, vague grayness in the first light of morning. No intruders, but three of the barges were gone, presumably moved to orbit. The Lothlrimarre vessel floated just east of Marquette, over the warehouse quarter. It looked like the slug was keeping his part of the deal.

Hamid drove into downtown Marquette. Sky signs floated brightly amid the two-hundred-storey towers, advertising dozens of products—some of which actually existed. Light from discos and shopping malls flooded the eight-lane streets. Of course the place was deserted; it was Saturday morning. Much of the business section was like this—a reconstruction of the original Marquette as it had been on Earth in the middle of the twenty-first century. That Marquette had sat on the edge of an enormous lake, called Superior. Through that century, as Superior became the splash-down point for heavy freight from space, Marquette had become one of the great port cities of Earth, the gateway to the solar system. The Tourists said it was legend, ur-mother to a thousand worlds.

Hamid turned off the broadway, down an underground ramp. The Marquette of today was for show, perhaps one percent the area of the original, with less than one percent the population. But from the air it looked good, the lights and bustle credible. For special events, the streets could be packed with a million people—everyone on the continent that could be spared from essential work. And the place wasn’t really a fraud; the Tourists knew this was a reconstruction. The point was, it was an authentic reconstruction, as could only be done by a people one step from the original source—that was the official line. And in fact, the people of Middle America had made enormous sacrifices over almost twenty years to have this ready in time for the Caravan.

The car rental was down a fifteen-storey spiral, just above the train terminal. That was for real, though the next arrival was a half hour away. Hamid got out, smelling the cool mustiness of the stone cavern, hearing only the echoes of his own steps. Millions of tonnes of ceramic and stone stood between them and the sky. Even an Outsider couldn’t see through that … he hoped. One sleepy-eyed attendant watched him fill out the forms. Hamid stared at the display, sweating even in the cool; would the guy in back notice? He almost laughed at the thought. His first sally into crime was the least of his worries. If Ravna&Tines were plugged into the credit net, then in a sense they really could see down here—and the bogus number Larry had supplied was all that kept him invisible.

They left in a Millennium Commander, the sort of car a Tourist might use to bum around in olden times. Hamid drove north through the underground, then east, and when finally they saw open sky again, they were driving south. Ahead was the warehouse district … and hanging above it, the slug’s barge, its spheres and cupolas green against the brightening sky. So huge. It looked near, but Hamid knew it was a good five thousand meters up.

A helicopter might be able to drop someone on its topside, or maybe land on one of the verandas—though it would be a tight fit under the overhang. But Hamid couldn’t fly a chopper, and wasn’t even sure how to rent one at this time of day. No, he and the Blab were going to try something a lot more straightforward, something he had done every couple of weeks since the Tourists arrived.

They were getting near the incoming lot, where Feds and Tourists held payments-to-date in escrow. Up ahead there would be cameras spotted on the roofs. He tinted all but the driver-side window, and pushed down on the Blab’s shoulders with his free hand. “Play hide for a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

Three hundred meters more and they were at the outer gate. He saw the usual three cops out front, and a fourth in an armored box to the side. If Ortega was feeling the heat, it could all end right here.

They looked real nervous, but they spent most of their time scanning the sky. They knew something was up, but they thought it was out of their hands. They took a quick glance at the Millennium Commander and waved him through. The inner fence was almost as easy, though here he had to enter his Guide ID … . If Ravna&Tines were watching the nets, Hamid and the Blab were running on borrowed time now.

He pulled into the empty parking lot at the main warehouse, choosing a slot with just the right position relative to the guard box. “Keep quiet a littie while, Blab,” he said. He hopped out and walked across the gravel yard. Maybe he should move faster, as if panicked? But no, the guard had already seen him. Okay, play it cool. He waved, kept walking. The glow of morning was already dimming the security lamps that covered the lot. No stars shared the sky with the clouds and the barges.

It was kind of a joke that merchandise from the Beyond was socked away here. The warehouse was big, maybe two hundred meters on a side, but an old place, sheet plastic and aging wood timbers.

The armored door buzzed even before Hamid touched it. He pushed his way through. “Hi, Phil.”

Luck! The other guards must be on rounds. Phil Lucas was a friendly sort, but not too bright, and not very familiar with the Blab. Lucas sat in the middle of the guard cubby, and the armored partition that separated him from the visitor trap was raised. To the left was a second door that opened into the warehouse itself. “Hi, Ham.” The guard looked back at him nervously. “Awful early to see you.”

“Yeah. Got a little problem. There’s a Tourist out in the Commander.” He waved through the armored window. “He’s drunk out of his mind. I need to get him Upstairs and quietly.”

Phil licked his lips. “Christ. Everything happens at once. Look, I’m sorry, Ham. We’ve got orders from the top at Federal Security: nothing comes down, nothing goes up. There’s some kind of a ruckus going on amongst the Outsiders. If they start shooting, we want it to be at each other, not us.”

“That’s the point. We think this fellow is part of the problem. If we can get him back, things should cool off. You should have a note on him. It’s Antris ban Reempt.”

“Oh. Him.” Ban Reempt was the most obnoxious Tourist of all. If he’d been an ordinary Middle American, he would have racked up a century of jail time in the last six months. Fortunately, he’d never killed anyone, so his antics were just barely ignorable. Lucas pecked at his dataset. “No, we don’t have anything.”

“Nuts. Everything stays jammed unless we can get this guy Upstairs,” Hamid paused judiciously, as if giving the matter serious thought. “Look, I’m going back to the car, see if I can call somebody to confirm this.”

Lucas was dubious. “Okay, but it’s gotta be from the top, Ham.”

“Right.”

The door buzzed open, and Hamid was jogging back across the parking lot. Things really seemed on track. Thank God he’d always been friendly with the cops running security here. The security people regarded most of the Guides as college-trained snots—and with some reason. But Hamid had had coffee with these guys more than once. He knew the system … he knew the incoming phone number for security confirmations.

Halfway across the lot, Hamid suddenly realized that he didn’t have the shakes anymore. The scheme, the adlibbing, it almost seemed normal—a skill he’d never guessed he had. Maybe that’s what desperation does to a fellow … . Somehow this was almost fun.

He pulled open the car door. “Back! Not yet.” He pushed the eager Blab onto the passenger seat. “Big game, Blab.” He rummaged through his satchel, retrieved the two comm sets. One was an ordinary head and throat model, the other had been modified for the Blab. He fastened the mike under the collar of his windbreaker. The earphone shouldn’t be needed, but it was small; he put it on, turned the volume down. Then he strapped the other commset around the Blab’s neck, turned off its mike, and clipped the receiver to her ear. “The game, Blab: Imitation. Imitation.” He patted the commset on her shoulder. The Blab was fairly bouncing around the Commander’s cab. “For sure. Sure, sure! Who, who?”

“Joe Ortega. Try it: ‘We must all pull together …’”

The words came back from the Blab as fast as he spoke them, but changed into the voice of the Middle American President. He rolled down the driver-side window; this worked best if there was eye contact. Besides, he might need her out of the car. “Okay. Stay here. I’ll go get us the sucker.” She rattled his instructions back in pompous tones.

One last thing: He punched a number into the car phone, and set its timer and no video option. Then he was out of the car, jogging back to the guard box. This sort of trick had worked often enough at school. Pray that it would work now. Pray that she wouldn’t ad lib.

He turned off the throat mike as Lucas buzzed him back into the visitor trap. “I got to the top. Someone—maybe even the Chief of Federal Security—will call back on the Red Line.”

Phil’s eyebrows went up. “That would do it.” Hamid’s prestige had just taken a giant step up.

Hamid made a show of impatient pacing about the visitor trap. He stopped at the outer door with his back to the guard. Now he really was impatient. Then the phone rang, and he heard Phil pick it up.

“Escrow One, Agent Lucas speaking, Sir!”

From where he was standing, Hamid could see the Blab. She was in the driver’s seat, looking curiously at the dash phone. Hamid turned on the throat mike and murmured, “Lucas, this is Joseph Stanley Ortega.”

Almost simultaneously, “Lucas, this is Joseph Stanley Ortega,” came from the phone behind him. The words were weighted with all the importance Hamid could wish, and something else: a furtiveness not in the public speeches. That was probably because of Hamid’s original delivery, but it didn’t sound too bad.

In any case, Phil Lucas was impressed. “Sir!”

“Agent Lucas, we have a problem.” Hamid concentrated on his words, and tried to ignore the Ortega echo. For him, that was the hardest part of the trick, especially when he had to speak more than a brief sentence. “There could be nuclear fire, unless the Tourists cool off. I’m with the National Command Authorities in deep shelter: it’s that serious.” Maybe that would explain why there was no video.

Phil’s voice quavered. “Yes, sir.” He wasn’t in deep shelter.

“Have you verified—” clicket “—my ID?” The click was in Hamid’s earphone; he didn’t hear it on the guard’s set. A loose connection in the headpiece?

“Yes, sir. I mean … just one moment.” Sounds of hurried keyboard tapping. There should be no problem with a voiceprint match, and Hamid needed things nailed tight to bring this off. “Yes, sir, you’re fine. I mean—”

“Good. Now listen carefully: The guide, Thompson, has a Tourist with him. We need that Outsider returned, quickly and quietly. Get the lift ready, and keep everybody clear of these two. If Thompson fails, millions may die. Give him whatever he asks for.” Out in the car, the Blab was having a high old time. Her front talons were hooked awkwardly over the steering wheel. She twisted it back and forth, “driving” and “talking” at the same time: the apotheosis of life—to be taken for a person by real people!

“Yes, sir!”

“Very well. Let’s—” clicket-click “—get moving on this.” And on that last click, the Ortega voice was gone. God damned cheapjack commset!

Lucas was silent a moment, respectfully waiting for his President to continue. Then, “Yes, sir. What must we do?”

Out in the Millennium Commander, the Blab was the picture of consternation. She turned toward him, eyes wide. What do I say now? Hamid repeated this line, as loud as he dared. No Ortega. She can’t hear anything I’m saying! He shut off his mike.

“Sir? Are you still there?”

“Line must be dead,” Hamid said casually, and gave the Blab a little wave to come running.

“Phone light says I still have a connection, Ham … . Mr. President, can you hear me? You were saying what we must do. Mr. President?”

The Blab didn’t recognize his wave. Too small. He tried again. She tapped a talon against her muzzle. Blab! Don’t ad lib! “Well, uh,” came Ortega’s voice, “don’t rush me. I’m thinking. I’m thinking! … We must all pull together or else millions may die. Don’t you think? I mean, it makes sense—” which it did not, and less so by the second. Lucas was making “uh-huh” sounds, trying to fit reason on the Blabber. His tone was steadily more puzzled, even suspicious.

No help for it. Hamid slammed his fist against the transp armor, and waved wildly to the Blab. Come here! Ortega’s voice died in midsyllable. He turned to see Lucas staring at him, surprise and uneasiness on his face. “Something’s going on here, and I don’t like it—” Somewhere in his mind, Phil had figured out he was being taken, yet the rest of him was carried forward by the inertia of the everyday. He leaned over the counter, to get Hamid’s line of view on the lot.

The original plan was completely screwed, yet strangely he felt no panic, no doubt; there were still options: Hamid smiled—and jumped across the counter, driving the smaller man into the corner of wall and counter. Phil’s hand reached wildly for the tab that would bring the partition down. Hamid just pushed him harder against the wall … and grabbed the guard’s pistol from its holster. He jammed the barrel into the other’s middle. “Quiet down, Phil.”

“Son of a bitch!” But the other stopped struggling. Hamid heard the Blab slam into the outer door.

“Okay. Kick the outside release.” The door buzzed. A moment later, the Blab was in the visitor trap, bouncing around his legs.

“Heh heh heh! That was good. That was really good!” The cackle was Lazy Larry’s but the voice was still Ortega’s.

“Now buzz the inner door.” The other gave his head a tight shake. Hamid punched Lucas’s gut with the point of the pistol. “Now!” For an instant, Phil seemed frozen. Then he kneed the control tab, and the inner door buzzed. Hamid pushed it ajar with his foot, then heaved Lucas away from the counter. The other bounced to his feet, his eyes staring at the muzzle of the pistol, his face very pale. Dead men don’t raise alarums. The thought was clear on his face.

Hamid hesitated, almost as shocked by his success as Lucas was. “Don’t worry, Phil.” He shifted his aim and fired a burst over Lucas’s shoulder … into the warehouse security processor. Fire and debris flashed back into the room—and now alarms sounded everywhere.

He pushed through the door, the Blab close behind. The armor clicked shut behind them; odds were it would stay locked now that the security processor was down. Nobody in sight, but he heard shouting. Hamid ran down the aisle of upgoing goods. They kept the agrav lift at the back of the building, under the main ceiling hatch. Things were definitely not going to plan, but if the lift was there, he could still—

“There he is!”

Hamid dived down an aisle, jigged this way and that between pallets … and then began walking very quietly. He was in the downcoming section now, surrounded by the goods that had been delivered thus far by the Caravan. These were the items that would lift Middle America beyond Old Earth’s twenty-first century. Towering ten meters above his head were stacks of room-temperature fusion electrics. With them—and the means to produce more—Middle America could trash its methanol economy and fixed fusion plants. Two aisles over were the raw agrav units. These looked more like piles of fabric than anything high-tech. Yet the warehouse lifter was built around one, and with them Middle America would soon make aircars as easily as automobiles.

Hamid knew there were cameras in the ceiling above the lights. Hopefully they were as dead as the security processor. Footsteps one aisle over. Hamid eased into the dark between two pallets. Quiet, quiet. The Blab didn’t feel like being quiet. She raced down the aisle ahead of him, raking the spaces between the pallets with a painfully loud imitation of his pistol. They’d see her in a second. He ran the other direction a few meters, and fired a burst into the air.

“Jesus! How many did asshole Lucas let in?” Someone very close replied, “That’s still low-power stuff.” Much quieter: “We’ll show these guys some firepower.” Hamid suddenly guessed there were only two of them. And with the guard box jammed, they might be trapped in here till the alarm brought guards from outside.

He backed away from the voices, continued toward the rear of the warehouse.

“Boo!” The Blab was on the pallets above him, talking to someone on the ground. Explosive shells smashed into the fusion electrics around her. The sounds bounced back and forth through the warehouse. Whatever it was, it was a cannon compared to his pistol. No doubt it was totally unauthorized for indoors, but that did Hamid little good. He raced forward, heedless of the destruction. “Get down!” he screamed at the pallets. A bundle of shadow and light materialized in front of him and streaked down the aisle.

A second roar of cannon fire, tearing through the space where he had just been. But something else was happening now. Blue light shone from somewhere in the racks of fusion electrics, sending brightness and crisp shadows across the walls ahead. It felt like someone had opened a furnace door behind him. He looked back. The blue was spreading, an arc-welder light that promised burns yet unfelt. He looked quickly away, afterimages dancing on his eyes, afterimages of the pallet shelves sagging in the heat.

The autosprinklers kicked on, an instant rainstorm. But this was a fire that water would not quench—and might even fuel. The water exploded into steam, knocking Hamid to his knees. He bounced up sprinting, falling, sprinting again. The agrav lift should be around the next row of pallets. In the back of his mind, something was analyzing the disaster. That explosive cannon fire had started things, a runaway melt in the fusion electrics. They were supposedly safer than meth engines—but they could melt down. This sort of destruction in a Middle American nuclear plant would have meant rad poisoning over a continent. But the Tourists claimed their machines melted clean—shedding low-energy photons and an enormous flood of particles that normal matter scarcely responded to. Hamid felt an urge to hysterical laughter; Slow Zone astronomers light-years away might notice this someday, a wiggle on their neutrino scopes, one more datum for their flawed cosmologies.

There was lightning in the rainstorm now, flashes between the pallets and across the aisle—into the raw agrav units. The clothlike material jerked and rippled, individual units floating upwards. Magic carpets released by a genie.

Then giant hands clapped him, sound that was pain, and the rain was gone, replaced by a hot wet wind that swept around and up. Morning light shown through the steamy mist. The explosion had blasted open the roof. A rainbow arced across the ruins. Hamid was crawling now. Sticky wet ran down his face, dripped redly on the floor. The pallets bearing the fusion electrics had collapsed. Fifteen meters away, molten plastic slurried atop flowing metal.

He could see the agrav lift now, what was left of it. The lift sagged like an old candle in the flow of molten metal. So. No way up. He pulled himself back from the glare, and leaned against the stacked agravs. They slid and vibrated behind him. The cloth was soft, yet it blocked the heat, and some of the noise. The pinkish blue of a dawn sky shown through the last scraps of mist. The Lothlrimarre barge hung there, four spherical pressure vessels embedded in intricate ramps and crenellations.

Jeeze. Most of the warehouse roof was just … gone. A huge tear showed through the far wall. There! The two guards. They were facing away from him, one half leaning on the other. Chasing him was very far from their minds at the moment. They were picking their way through the jumble, trying to get out of the warehouse. Unfortunately, a rivulet of silver metal crossed their path. One false step and they’d be ankle deep in the stuff. But they were lucky, and in fifteen seconds passed from sight around the outside of the building.

No doubt he could get out that way, too … . But that wasn’t why he was here. Hamid struggled to his feet, and began shouting for the Blab. The hissing, popping sounds were loud, but not like before. If she were conscious, she’d hear him. He wiped blood from his lips and limped along the row of agrav piles. Don’t die, Blab. Don’t die.

There was motion everywhere. The piles of agravs had come alive. The top ones simply lifted off, tumbled upwards, rolling and unrolling. The lower layers strained and jerked. Normal matter might not notice the flood of never-never particles from the melt-down; the agravs were clearly not normal. Auras flickered around the ones trapped at the bottom. But this was not the eye-sizzling burn of the fusion electrics. This was a soft thing, an awakening rather than an explosion. Hamid’s eyes were caught on the rising. Hundreds of them just floating off, gray and russet banners in the morning light. He leaned back. Straight up, the farthest ones were tiny specks against the blue. Maybe—

Something banged into his legs, almost dumping him back on the floor. “Wow. So loud.” The Blab had found him! Hamid knelt and grabbed her around the neck. She looked fine! A whole lot better than he did anyway. Like most smaller animals, she could take a lot of bouncing around. He ran his hands down her shoulders. There were some nicks, a spattering of blood. And she looked subdued, not quite the hellion of before. “Loud. Loud,” she kept saying.

“I know, Blab. But that’s the worst.” He looked back into the sky. At the rising agravs … at the Lothlrimarre barge. It would be crazy to try … but he heard sirens outside.

He patted the Blab, then stood and clambered up the nearest pile of agravs. The material, hundreds of separate units piled like blankets, gave beneath his boots like so much foam rubber. He slid back a ways after each step. He grabbed at the edges of the units above him, and pulled himself near the top. He wanted to test one that was free to rise. Hamid grabbed the top layer, already rippling in an unsensed wind. He pulled out his pocket knife, and slashed at the material. It parted smoothly, with the resistance of heavy felt. He ripped off a strip of the material, stuffed it in his pocket, then grabbed again at the top layer. The unit fluttered in his hands, a four-meter square straining for the sky. It slowly tipped him backwards. His feet left the pile. It was rising as fast as the unloaded ones!

“Wait for me! Wait!” The Blab jumped desperately at his boots. Two meters up, three meters. Hamid gulped, and let go. He crashed to the concrete, lay stunned for a moment, imagining what would have happened if he’d dithered an instant longer … . Still. He took the scrap of agrav from his pocket, stared at it as it tugged on his fingers. There was a pattern in the reddish-gray fabric, intricate and recursive. The Tourists said it was in a different class from the fusion electrics. The electrics involved advanced technology, but were constructable within the Slow Zone. Agrav, on the other hand … the effect could be explained in theory, but its practical use depended on instant-by-instant restabilization at atomic levels. The Tourists claimed there were billions of protein-sized processors in the fabric. This was an import—not just from the Beyond—but from Transhuman Space. Till now, Hamid had been a skeptic. Flying was such a prosaic thing. But … these things had no simple logic. They were more like living creatures, or complex control systems. They seemed a lot like the “smart matter” Larry claimed was common in Transhuman technology.

Hamid cut the strip into two different-sized pieces. The cut edges were smooth, quite unlike cuts in cloth or leather. He let the fragments go … . They drifted slowly upwards, like leaves on a breeze. But after a few seconds, the large one took the lead, falling higher and higher above the smaller. I could come down just by trimming the fabric! And he remembered how the carpet had drifted sideways, in the direction of his grasp.

The sirens were louder. He looked at the pile of agravs. Funny. A week ago he had been worried about flying commercial air to Westland. “You want games, Blab? This is the biggest yet.”

He climbed back up the pile. The top layer was just beginning to twitch. They had maybe thirty seconds, if it was like the others. He pulled the fabric around him, tying it under his arms. “Blab! Get your ass up here!”

She came, but not quite with the usual glee. Things had been rough this morning—or maybe she was just brighter than he was. He grabbed her, and tied the other end of the agrav under her shoulders. As the agrav twitched toward flight, the cloth seemed to shrink. He could still cut the fabric, but the knots were tight. He grabbed the Blab under her hind quarters, and drew her up to his chest—just like Pop used to do when the Blab was a pup. Only now, she was big. Her forelegs stuck long over his shoulders.

The fabric came taut around his armpits. Now he was standing. Now—his feet left the pile. He looked down at the melted pallets, the silver metal rivers that dug deep through the warehouse floor. The Blab was making the sounds of a small boy crying.

They were through the roof. Hamid shuddered as the morning chill turned his soaked clothing icy. The sun was at the horizon, its brilliance no help against the cold. Shadows grew long and crisp from the buildings. The guts of the warehouse lay open below them; from here it looked dark, but lightning still flickered. More reddish-gray squares floated up from the ruins. In the gravel lot fronting the warehouse, there were fire trucks and armored vehicles. Men ran back and forth from the guard box. A squad was moving around the side of the building. Two guys by the armored cars pointed at him, and others just stopped to stare. A boy and his not-dog, swinging beneath a wrong-way parachute. He’d seen enough Feds ‘n’ Crooks to know they could shoot him down easily, any number of ways. One of the figures climbed into the armored car. If they were half as trigger happy as the guards inside the warehouse …

Half a minute passed. The scene below could fit between his feet now. The Blab wasn’t crying anymore, and he guessed the chill was no problem for her. The Blab’s neck and head extended over his shoulder. He could feel her looking back and forth. “Wow,” she said softly. “Wow.”

Rockabye baby. They swung back and forth beneath the agrav. Back and forth. The swings were getting wider each time! In a sickening whirl; the sky and ground traded places. He was buried head first in agrav fabric. He struggled out of the mess. They weren’t hanging below the agrav now, they were lying on top of it. This was crazy. How could it be stable with them on top? In a second it would dump them back under. He held tight to the Blab … but no more swinging. It was as if the hanging-down position had been the unstable one. More evidence that the agrav was smart matter, its processors using underlying nature to produce seemingly unnatural results.

The damn thing really was a flying carpet! Of course, with all the knots, the four-meter square of fabric was twisted and crumpled. It looked more like the Blab’s nest of blankets back home than the flying carpets of fantasy.

The warehouse district was out of sight beneath the carpet. In the spaces around and above them, dozens of agravs paced him—some just a few meters away, some bare specks in the sky. Westwards, they were coming even with the tops of the Marquette towers: brown and ivory walls, vast mirrors of windows reflecting back the landscape of morning. Southwards, Ann Arbor was a tiny crisscross of streets, almost lost in the bristle of leafless trees. The quad was clearly visible, the interior walks, the tiny speck of red that was Morale Hall. He’d had roughly this view every time they flew back from the farm, but now … there was nothing around him. It was just Hamid and the Blab … and the air stretching away forever beneath them. Hamid gulped, and didn’t look down for a while.

They were still rising. The breeze came straight down upon them—and it seemed to be getting stronger. Hamid shivered uncontrollably, teeth chattering. How high up were they? Three thousand meters? Four? He was going numb, and when he moved he could hear ice crackling in his jacket. He felt dizzy and nauseous—five thousand meters was about the highest you’d want to go without oxygen on Middle America. He thought he could stop the rise; if not, they were headed for space, along with the rest of the agravs.

But he had to do more than slow the rise, or descend. He looked up at the Lothlrimarre’s barge. It was much nearer—and two hundred meters to the east. If he couldn’t move this thing sideways, he’d need the slug’s active cooperation.

It was something he had thought about—for maybe all of five seconds—back in the warehouse. If the agrav had been an ordinary lighter-than-air craft, there’d be no hope. Without props or jets, a balloon goes where the wind says; the only control comes from finding the altitude where the wind and you want the same thing. But when he grabbed that first carpet, it really had slid horizontally toward the side he was holding … .

He crept toward the edge. The agrav yielded beneath his knees, but didn’t tilt more than a small boat would. Next to him, the Blab looked over the edge, straight down. Her head jerked this way and that as she scanned the landscape. “Wow,” she kept saying. Could she really understand what she was seeing?

The wind shifted a little. It came a bit from the side now, not straight from above. He really did have control! Hamid smiled around chattering teeth.

The carpet rose faster and faster. The downward wind was an arctic blast. They must be going up at fifteen or twenty klicks per hour. The Lothlrimarre barge loomed huge above them … now almost beside them.

God, they were above it now! Hamid pulled out his knife, picked desperately at the blade opener with numbed fingers. It came open abruptly—and almost popped out of his shaking hand. He trimmed small pieces from the edge of the carpet. The wind from heaven stayed just as strong. Bigger pieces! He tore wildly at the cloth. One large strip, two. And the wind eased … stopped. Hamid bent over the edge of the carpet, and stuffed his vertigo back down his throat. Perfect. They were directly over the barge, and closing.

The nearest of the four pressure spheres was so close it blocked his view of the others. Hamid could see the human habitat, the conference area. They would touch down on a broad flat area next to the sphere. The aiming couldn’t have been better. Hamid guessed the slug must be maneuvering too, moving the barge precisely under his visitor.

There was a flash of heat, and an invisible fist slammed into the carpet. Hamid and the Blab tumbled—now beneath the agrav, now above. He had a glimpse of the barge. A jet of yellow-white spewed from the sphere, ammonia and hydrogen at one thousand atmospheres. The top pressure sphere had been breached. The spear of superpressured gas was surrounded by pale flame where the hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen burned.

The barge fell out of view, leaving thunder and burning mists. Hamid held onto the Blab and as much of the carpet as he could wrap around them. The tumbling stopped; they were upside down in the heavy swaddling. Hamid looked out:

“Overhead” was the brown and gray of farmland in late autumn. Marquette was to his left. He bent around, peeked into the sky. There! The barge was several klicks away. The top pressure vessel was spreading fire and mist, but the lower ones looked okay. Pale violet flickered from between the spheres. Moments later, thunder echoed across the sky. The slug was fighting back!

He twisted in the jumble of cloth, trying to see the high sky. To the north … a single blue-glowing trail lanced southwards … split into five separate, jigging paths that cooled through orange to red. It was beautiful … but somehow like a jagged claw sketched against the sky. The claw tips dimmed to nothing, but whatever caused them still raced forward. The attackers’ answering fire slagged the north-facing detail of the barge. It crumpled like trash plastic in a fire. The bottom pressure vessels still looked okay, but if the visitors’ deck got zapped like that, Larry would be a dead man.

Multiple sonic booms rocked the carpet. Things swept past, too small and fast to clearly see. The barge’s guns still flickered violet, but the craft was rising now—faster than he had ever seen it move.

After a moment, the carpet drifted through one more tumble, and they sat heads up. The morning had been transformed. Strange clouds were banked around and above him, some burning, some glowing, all netted with the brownish-reds of nitrogen oxides. The stench of ammonia burned his eyes and mouth. The Blab was making noises through her mouth, true coughing and choking sounds.

The Tourists were long gone. The Lothlrimarre was a dot at the top of the sky. All the other agravs had passed by. He and the Blab were alone in the burning clouds. Probably not for long. Hamid began sawing at the agrav fabric—tearing off a slice, testing for an upwelling breeze, then tearing off another. They drifted through the cloud deck into a light drizzle, a strange rain that burned the skin as it wet them. He slid the carpet sideways into the sunlight, and they could breathe again. Things looked almost normal, except where the clouds cast a great bloody shadow across the farmland.

Where best to land? Hamid looked over the edge of the carpet … and saw the enemy waiting. It was a cylinder, tapered, with a pair of small fins at one end. It drifted through the carpet’s shadow, and he realized the enemy craft was close. It couldn’t be more than ten meters long, less than two meters across at the widest. It hung silent, pacing the carpet’s slow descent. Hamid looked up, and saw the others—four more dark shapes. They circled in, like killer fish nosing at a possible lunch. One slid right over them, so slow and near he could have run his palm down its length. There were no ports, no breaks in the dull finish. But the fins—red glowed dim from within them, and Hamid felt a wave of heat as they passed.

The silent parade went on for a minute, each killer getting its look. The Blab’s head followed the craft around and around. Her eyes were wide, and she was making the terrified whistling noises of the night before. The air was still, but for the faint updraft of the carpet’s descent. Or was it? … The sound grew, a hissing sound like Tines had made during his phone call. Only now it came from all the killers, and there were overtones lurking at the edge of sensibility, tones that never could have come from an ordinary telephone.

“Blab.” He reached to stroke her neck. She slashed at his hand, her needle-teeth slicing deep. Hamid gasped in pain, and rolled back from her. The Blab’s pelt was puffed out as far as he had ever seen it. She looked twice normal size, a very large carnivore with death glittering in her eyes. Her long neck snapped this way and that, trying to track all the killers at once. Fore and rear talons dragged long rips through the carpet. She climbed onto the thickest folds of the carpet, and shrieked at the killers … and collapsed.

For a moment, Hamid couldn’t move. His hand, the scream: razors across his hand, icepicks jammed in his ears. He struggled to his knees and crawled to the Blabber. “Blab?” No answer, no motion. He touched her flank: limp as something fresh dead.

In twenty years, Hamid Thompson had never had close friends, but he had never been alone, either. Until now. He looked up from the Blabber’s body, at the circling shapes.

Alone at four thousand meters. He didn’t have much choice when one of the killer fish came directly at him, when something wide and dark opened from its belly. The darkness swept around them, swallowing all.

 

Hamid had never been in space before. Under other circumstances, he would have reveled in the experience. The glimpse he’d had of Middle America from low orbit was like a beautiful dream. But now, all he could see through the floor of his cage was a bluish dot, nearly lost in the sun’s glare. He pushed hard against the clear softness, and rolled onto his back. It was harder than a one-handed pushup to do that. He guessed the mothership was doing four or five gees … and had been for hours.

When they had pulled him off the attack craft, Hamid had been semiconscious. He had no idea what acceleration that shark boat reached, but it was more than he could take. He remembered that glimpse of Middle America, blue and serene. Then … they’d taken the Blab—or her body—away. Who? There had been a human, the Ravna woman. She had done something to his hand; it wasn’t bleeding anymore. And … and there had been the Blabber, up and walking around. No, the pelt pattern had been all wrong. That must have been Tines. There had been the hissing voice, and some kind of argument with Ravna.

Hamid stared up at the sunlight on the ceiling and walls. His own shadow lay spread-eagled on the ceiling. In the first hazy hours, he had thought it was another prisoner. The walls were gray, seamless, but with scrape marks and stains, as though heavy equipment was used here. He thought there was a door in the ceiling, but he couldn’t remember for sure. There was no sign of one now. The room was an empty cubical, featureless, its floor showing clear to the stars: surely not an ordinary brig. There were no toilet facilities—and at five gees they wouldn’t have helped. The air was thick with the stench of himself … . Hamid guessed the room was an airlock. The transparent floor might be nothing more than a figment of some field generator’s imagination. A flick of a switch and Hamid would be swept away forever.

The Blabber gone, Pop gone, maybe Larry and the slug gone … . Hamid raised his good hand a few centimeters and clenched his fist. Lying here was the first time he’d ever thought about killing anyone. He thought about it a lot now … . It kept the fear tied down.

“Mr. Thompson.” Ravna’s voice. Hamid suppressed a twitch of surprise: after hours of rage, to hear the enemy. “Mr. Thompson, we are going to free fall in fifteen seconds. Do not be alarmed.”

So, airline courtery of a sudden.

The force that had squished him flat these hours, that had made it an exercise even to breathe, slowly lessened. From beyond the walls and ceiling he heard small popping noises. For a panicky instant, it seemed as though the floor had disappeared and he was falling through. He twisted. His hand hit the barrier … and he floated slowly across the room, toward the wall that had been the ceiling. A door had opened. He drifted through, into a hall that would have looked normal except for the intricate pattern of grooves and ledges that covered the walls.

“Thirty meters down the hall is a latrine,” came Ravna’s voice. “There are clean clothes that should fit you. When you are done … when you are done, we will talk.”

Damn right. Hamid squared his shoulders and pulled himself down the hall.

 

She didn’t look like a killer. There was anger—tension?—on her face, the face of someone who has been awake a long time and has fought hard—and doesn’t expect to win.

Hamid drifted slowly into the—conference room? bridge?—trying to size everything up at once. It was a large room, with a low ceiling. Moving across it was easy in zero gee, slow bounces from floor to ceiling and back. The wall curved around, transparent along most of its circumference. There were stars and night dark beyond.

Ravna had been standing in a splash of light. Now she moved back a meter, into the general dimness. Somehow she slipped her foot into the floor, anchoring herself. She waved him to the other side of a table. They stood in the half crouch of zero gee, less than two meters apart. Even so, she looked taller than he had guessed from the phone call. Her mass might be close to his. The rest of her was as he remembered, though she looked very tired. Her gaze flickered across him, and away. “Hello, Mr. Thompson. The floor will hold your foot, if you tap it gently.”

Hamid didn’t take the advice; he held onto the table edge and jammed his feet against the floor. He would have something to brace against if the time came to move quickly. “Where is my Blabber?” His voice came out hoarse, more desperate than demanding.

“Your pet is dead.”

There was a tiny hesitation before the last word. She was as bad a liar as ever. Hamid pushed back the rage: if the Blab was alive, there was something still possible beyond revenge. “Oh.” He kept his face blank.

“However, we intend to return you safely to home.” She gestured at the star fields around them. “The six-gee boost was to avoid unnecessary fighting with the Lothlrimarre being. We will coast outwards some farther, perhaps even go into ram drive. But Mr. Tines will take you back to Middle America in one of our attack boats. There will be no problem to land you without attracting notice … perhaps on the western continent, somewhere out of the way.” Her tone was distant. He noticed that she never looked directly at him for more than an instant. Now she was staring just to one side of his face. He remembered the phone call, how she seemed to ignore his video. Up close, she was just as attractive as before—more. Just once he would like to see her smile. And somewhere there was unease that he could be so attracted by a murderous stranger.

If only. “If only I could understand why. Why did you kill the Blab? Why did you kill my father?”

Ravna’s eyes narrowed. “That cheating piece of filth? He is too tricky to kill. He was gone when we visited his farm. I’m not sure I have killed anyone on this operation. The Lothlrimarre is still functioning, I know that.” She sighed. “We were all very lucky. You have no idea what Tines has been like these last days … . He called you last night.”

Hamid nodded numbly.

“Well, he was mellow then. He tried to kill me when I took over the ship. Another day like this and he would have been dead—and most likely your planet would have been so too.”

Hamid remembered the Lothlrimarre’s theory about the tines’s need. And now that the creature had the Blab … . “So now Tines is satisfied?”

Ravna nodded vaguely, missing the quaver in his voice. “He’s harmless now and very confused, poor guy. Assimilation is hard. It will be a few weeks … but he’ll stabilize, probably turn out better than he ever was.”

Whatever that means.

She pushed back from the table, stopped herself with a hand on the low ceiling. Apparently their meeting was over. “Don’t worry. He should be well enough to take you home quite soon. Now I will show you your—”

“Don’t rush him, Rav. Why should he want to go back to Middle America?” The voice was a pleasant tenor, human sounding but a little slurred.

Ravna bounced off the ceiling. “I thought you were going to stay out of this! Of course the boy is going back to Middle America. That’s his home; that’s where he fits.”

“I wonder.” The unseen speaker laughed. He sounded cheerfully—joyfully—drunk. “Your name is shit down there, Hamid, did you know that?”

“Huh?”

“Yup. You slagged the Caravan’s entire shipment of fusion electrics. ’Course you had a little help from the Federal Police, but that fact is being ignored. Much worse, you destroyed most of the agrav units. Whee. Up, up and away. And there’s no way those can be replaced short of a trip back to the Outsi—”

“Shut up!” Ravna’s anger rode over the good cheer. “The agrav units were a cheap trick. Nothing that subtle can work in the Zone for long. Five years from now they would all have faded.”

“Sure, sure. I know that, and you know that. But both Middle America and the Tourists figure you’ve trashed this Caravan, Hamid. You’d be a fool to go back.”

Ravna shouted something in a language Hamid had never heard.

“English, Rav, English. I want him to understand what is happening.”

“He is going back!” Ravna’s voice was furious, almost desperate. “We agreed!”

“I know, Rav.” A little of the rampant joy left the voice. It sounded truly sympathetic. “And I’m sorry. But I was different then, and I understand things better now … . Hey, I’ll be down in a minute, okay?”

She closed her eyes. It’s hard to slump in free fall, but Ravna came close, her shoulders and arms relaxing, her body drifting slowly up from the floor. “Oh, Lord,” she said softly.

Out in the hall, someone was whistling a tune that had been popular in Marquette six months ago. A shadow floated down the walls, followed by … the Blab? Hamid lurched off the table, flailed wildly for a handhold. He steadied himself, got a closer look.

No. Not the Blab. It was of the same race certainly, but this one had an entirely different pattern of black and white. The great patch of black around one eye and white around the other would have been laughable … if you didn’t know what you were looking at: at last to see Mr. Tines.

Man and alien regarded each other for a long moment. It was a little smaller than the Blab. It wore a checkered orange scarf about its neck. Its paws looked no more flexible than his Blab’s … but he didn’t doubt the intelligence that looked back from its eyes. The tines drifted to the ceiling, and anchored itself with a deft swipe of paw and talons. There were faint sounds in the air now, squeaks and twitters almost beyond hearing. If he listened close enough, Hamid guessed he would hear the hissing, too.

The tines looked at him, and laughed pleasantly—the tenor voice of a minute before. “Don’t rush me! I’m not all here yet.”

Hamid looked at the doorway. There were two more there, one with a jeweled collar—the leader? They glided through the air and tied down next to the first. Hamid saw more shadows floating down the hall.

“How many?” he asked.

“I’m six now.” He thought it was a different tines that answered, but the voice was the same.

The last three floated in the doorway. One wore no scarf or jewelry … and looked very familiar.

“Blab!” Hamid pushed off the table. He went into a spin that missed the door by several meters. The Blabber—it must be her—twisted skillfully around and fled the room.

“Stay away!” For an instant the tines’s voice changed, held the same edge as the night before. Hamid stood on the wall next to the doorway and looked down the hall. The Blab was there, sitting on the closed door at the far end. Hamid’s orientation flipped … the hall could just as well be a deep, bright-lit well, with the Blab trapped at the bottom of it.

“Blab?” He said softly, aware of the tines behind him.

She looked up at him. “I can’t play the old games anymore, Hamid,” she said in her softest femvoice. He stared for a moment, uncomprehending. Over the years, the Blab said plenty of things that—by accident or in the listeners’ imagination—might seem humanly intelligent. Here, for the first time, he knew that he was hearing sense … . And he guessed what Ravna meant when she said the Blab was dead.

Hamid backed away from the edge of the pit. He looked at the other tines, remembered that their speech came as easily from one as the other. “You’re like a hive of roaches, aren’t you?”

“A little.” The tenor voice came from somewhere among them.

“But telepathic,” Hamid said.

The one who had been his friend answered, but in the tenor voice: “Yes, between myselves. But it’s no sixth sense. You’ve known about it all your life. I like to talk a lot. Blabber.” The squeaking and the hissing: just the edge of all they were saying to each other across their two-hundred-kilohertz bandwidth. “I’m sorry I flinched. Myselves are still confused. I don’t know quite who I am.”

The Blab pushed off and drifted back into the bridge. She grabbed a piece of ceiling as she came even with Hamid. She extended her head toward him, tentatively, as though he were a stranger. I feel the same way about you, thought Hamid. But he reached out to brush her neck with his fingers. She twitched back, glided across the room to nestle among the other tines.

Hamid stared at them staring back. He had a sudden image: a pack of long-necked rats beadily analyzing their prey. “So. Who is the real Mr. Tines? The monster who’d smash a world, or the nice guy I’m hearing now?”

Ravna answered, her voice tired, distant. “The monster tines is gone … or going. Don’t you see? The pack was unbalanced. It was dying.”

“There were five in my pack, Hamid. Not a bad number: some of the brightest packs are that small. But I was down from seven—two of myselves had been killed. The ones remaining were mismatched, and only one of them was female.” Tines paused. “I know humans can go for years without contact with the opposite sex, and suffer only mild discomfort—”

Tell me about it.

“—but tines are very different. If a pack’s sex ratio gets too lopsided, especially if there is a mismatch of skills, then the mind disintegrates … . Things can get very nasty in the process.” Hamid noticed that all the time it talked, the two tines next to the one with the orange scarf had been nibbling at the scarf’s knots. They moved quickly, perfectly coordinated, untying and retying the knots. Tines doesn’t need hands. Or put another way, he already had six. Hamid was seeing the equivalent of a human playing nervously with his tie.

“Ravna lied when she said the Blab is dead. I forgive her: she wants you off our ship, with no more questions, no more hassle. But the Blabber isn’t dead. She was rescued … from being an animal the rest of her life. And her rescue saved the pack. I feel so … happy. Better even than when I was seven. I can understand things that have been puzzles for years. Your Blab is far more language-oriented than any of my other selves. I could never talk like this without her.”

Ravna had drifted toward the pack. Now she had her feet planted on the floor beneath them. Her head brushed the shoulder of one, was even with the eyes of another. “Imagine the Blabber as the verbal hemisphere of a human brain,” she said to Hamid.

“Not quite,” Tines said. “A human hemisphere can almost carry on by itself. The Blab by itself could never be a person.”

Hamid remembered how the Blab’s greatest desire had often seemed just to be a real person. And listening to this creature, he heard echoes of the Blab. It would be easy to accept what they were saying … . Yet if you turned the words just a little, you had enslavement and rape—the slug’s theory with frosting.

Hamid turned away from all the eyes and looked across the star clouds. How much should I believe? How much should I seem to believe? “One of the Tourists wanted to sell us a gadget, an ‘ftl radio.’ Did you know that we used it to ask about the tines? Do you know what we found?” He told them about the horrors Larry had found around the galactic rim.

Ravna exchanged a glance with the tines by her head. For a moment the only sound was the twittering and hissing. Then Tines spoke. “Imagine the most ghastly villains of Earth’s history. Whatever they are, whatever holocausts they set, I assure you much worse has happened elsewhere … . Now imagine that this regime was so vast, so effectively evil that no honest historians survived. What stories do you suppose would be spread about the races they exterminated?”

“Okay. So—”

“Tines are not monsters. On average, we are no more bloodthirsty than you humans. But we are descended from packs of wolf-like creatures. We are deadly warriors. Given reasonable equipment and numbers, we can outfight most anything in the Slow Zone.” Hamid remembered the shark pack of attack boats. With one animal in each, and radio communication … no team of human pilots could match their coordination. “We were once a great power in our part of the Slow Zone. We had enemies, even when there was no war. Would you trust creatures who live indefinitely, but whose personalities may drift from friendly to indifferent—even to inimical—as their components die and are replaced?”

“And you’re such a peach of a guy because you’ve got the Blab?”

“Yes! Though you liked … I know you would have liked me when I was seven. But the Blab has a lovely outlook; she makes it fun to be alive.”

Hamid looked at Ravna and the pack who surrounded her. So the tines had been great fighters. That he believed. So they were now virtually extinct, having run into something even deadlier. That he could believe, too. Beyond that … he’d be a fool to believe anything. He could imagine Tines as a friend, he wanted Ravna as one. But all the talk, all the seeming argument—it could just as well be manipulation. One thing was sure: if he returned to Middle America, he would never know the truth. He might live the rest of his life safe and cozy, but he wouldn’t have the Blab, and he would never know what had really happened to her.

He gave Ravna a lopsided smile. “Back to square one then. I want passage to the Beyond with you.”

“Out of the question. I-I made that clear from the beginning.”

Hamid pushed nearer, stopped a meter in front of her. “Why won’t you look at me?” he said softly. “Why do you hate me so much?”

For a full second, her eyes looked straight into his. “I don’t hate you!” Her face clouded, as if she were about to weep. “It’s just that you’re such a God damned disappointment!” She pushed back abruptly, knocking the tines out of her way.

He followed her slowly back to the conference table. She “stood” there, talking to herself in some unknown language. “She’s swearing to her ancestors,” murmured a tines that drifted close by Hamid’s head. “Her kind is big on that sort of thing.”

Hamid anchored himself across from her. He looked at her face. Young, no older than twenty it looked. But Outsiders had some control over aging. Besides, Ravna had spent at least the last ten years in relativistic flight. “You hired my—you hired Hussein Thompson to adopt me, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

She looked back at him for a moment, this time not flinching away. Finally she sighed. “Okay, I will try but … there are many things you from the Slow Zone do not understand. Middle America is close to the Beyond, but you see out through a tiny hole. You can have even less concept of what lies beyond the Beyond, in the Transhuman reaches.” She was beginning to sound like Lazy Larry.

“I’m willing to start with the version for five-year-olds.”

“Okay.” The faintest of smiles crossed her face. It was everything he’d guessed it would be. He wondered how he could make her do it again. “‘Once upon a time,’”—the smile again, a little wider!—“there was a very wise and good man, as wise and good as any mere human or human equivalent can ever be: a mathematical genius, a great general, an even greater peacemaker. He lived five hundred years subjective, and half that time he was fighting a very great evil.”

The Tines put in, “Just a part of that evil chewed up my race for breakfast.”

Ravna nodded. “Eventually it chewed our hero, too. He’s been dead almost a century objective. The enemy has been very alert to keep him dead. Tines and I may be the last people trying to bring him back … . How much do you know about cloning, Mr. Thompson?”

Hamid couldn’t answer for a moment; it was too clear where all this was going. “The Tourists claim they can build a viable zygote from almost any body cell. They say it’s easy, but that what you get is no more than an identical twin of the original.”

“That is about right. In fact, the clone is often much less than an identical twin. The uterine environment determines much of an individual’s adult characteristics. Consider mathematical ability. There is a genetic component—but part of mathematical genius comes from the fetus getting just the right testosterone overdose. A little too much and you have a dummy.

“Tines and I have been running for a long time. Fifty years ago we reached Lothlrimarre—the back end of nowhere if there ever was one. We had a clonable cell from the great man. We did our best with the humaniform medical equipment that was available. The newborn looked healthy enough … .”

Rustle, hiss.

“But why not just raise the—child—yourself?” Hamid said. “Why hire someone to take him into the Slow Zone?”

Ravna bit her lip and looked away. It was Tines who replied: “Two reasons. The enemy wants you permanently dead. Raising you in the Slow Zone was the best way to keep you out of sight. The other reason is more subtle. We don’t have records of your original memories; we can’t make a perfect copy. But if we could give you an upbringing that mimicked the original’s … then we’d have someone with the same outlook.”

“Like having the original back, with a bad case of amnesia.”

Tines chuckled. “Right. And things went very well at first. It was great good luck to run into Hussein Thompson at Lothlrimarre. He seemed a bright fellow, willing to work for his money. He brought the newborn in suspended animation back to Middle America, and married a woman equally bright, to be your mother.

“We had everything figured, the original’s background imitated better than we had ever hoped. I even gave up one of my selves, a newborn, to be with you.”

“I guess I know most of the rest,” said Hamid. “Everything went fine for the first eight years,” the happy years of a loving family, “till it became clear that I wasn’t a math genius. Then your hired hand didn’t know what to do, and your plan fell apart.”

“It didn’t have to!” Ravna slapped the table. The motion pulled her body up, almost free of the foot anchors. “The math ability was a big part, but there was still a chance—if Thompson hadn’t welshed on us.” She glared at Hamid, and then at the pack. “The original’s parents died when he was ten years old. Hussein and his woman were supposed to disappear when the clone was ten, in a faked air crash. That was the agreement! Instead—” she swallowed. “We talked to him. He wouldn’t meet in person. He was full of excuses, the clever bastard. ‘I didn’t see what good it would do to hurt the boy any more,’ he said. ‘He’s no superman, just a good kid. I wanted him to be happy!’” She choked on her own indignation. “Happy! If he knew what we have been through, what the stakes are—”

Hamid’s face felt numb, frozen. He wondered what it would be like to throw up in zero gee. “What—what about my mother?” he said in a very small voice.

Ravna gave her head a quick shake. “She tried to persuade Thompson. When that didn’t work, she left you. By then it was too late; besides, that sort of abandonment is not the trauma the original experienced. But she did her part of the bargain; we paid her most of what we promised … . We came to Middle America expecting to find someone very wonderful, living again. Instead, we found—”

“—a piece of trash?” He couldn’t get any anger into the question.

She gave a shaky sigh. “ … No, I don’t really think that. Hussein Thompson probably did raise a good person, and that’s more than most can claim. But if you were the one we had hoped, you would be known all over Middle America by now, the greatest inventor, the greatest mover since the colony began. And that would be just the beginning.” She seemed to be looking through him … remembering?

Tines made a diffident throat-clearing sound. “Not a piece of trash at all. And not just a ‘good kid,’ either. A part of me lived with Hamid for twenty years; the Blabber’s memories are about as clear as a tines fragment’s can be. Hamid is not just a failed dream to me, Rav. He’s different, but I like to be around him almost as much as with … the other one. And when the crunch came—well, I saw him fight back. Given his background, even the original couldn’t have done better. Hitching a ride on a raw agrav was the sort of daring that—”

“Okay, Tiny, the boy is daring and quick. But there’s a difference between suicidal foolishness and calculated risk-taking. This late in life, there’s no way he’ll become more than a ‘good man.’” Sarcasm lilted in the words.

“We could do worse, Rav.”

“We must do far better, and you know it! See here. It’s two years subjective to get out of the Zone, and our suspension gear is failed. I will not accept seeing his face every day for two years. He goes back to Middle America.” She kicked off, drifted toward the tines that hung over Hamid.

“I think not,” said Tines. “If he doesn’t want to go, I won’t fly him back.”

Anger and—strangely—panic played on Ravna’s face. “This isn’t how you were talking last week.”

“Heh heh heh.” Lazy Larry’s cackle. “I’ve changed. Haven’t you noticed?”

She grabbed a piece of ceiling and looked down at Hamid, calculating. “Boy. I don’t think you understand. We’re in a hurry; we won’t be stopping any place like Lothlrimarre. There is one last way we might bring the original back to life—perhaps even with his own memories. You’ll end up in Transhuman space if you come with us. The chances are that none of us will surv—” She stopped, and a slow smile spread across her face. Not a friendly smile. “Have you not thought what use your body might still be to us? You know nothing of what we plan. We may find ways of using you like a—like a blank data cartridge.”

Hamid looked back at her, hoping no doubts showed on his face. “Maybe. But I’ll have two years to prepare, won’t I?”

They glared at each other for a long moment, the greatest eye contact yet. “So be it,” she said at last. She drifted a little closer. “Some advice. We’ll be two years cooped up here. It’s a big ship. Stay out of my way.” She drew back and pulled herself across the ceiling, faster and faster. She arrowed into the hallway beyond, and out of sight.

Hamid Thompson had his ticket to the Outside. Some tickets cost more than others. What much would he pay for his?

 

Eight hours later, the ship was under ram drive, outward bound. Hamid sat in the bridge, alone. The “windows” on one side of the room showed the view aft. Middle America’s sun cast daylight across the room.

Invisible ahead of them, the interplanetary medium was being scooped in, fuel for the ram. The acceleration was barely perceptible, perhaps a fiftieth of a gee. The ram drive was for the long haul. That acceleration would continue indefinitely, eventually rising to almost half a gravity—and bringing them near light speed.

Middle America was a fleck of blue, trailing a white dot and a yellow one. It would be many hours before his world and its moons were lost from sight—and many days before they were lost to telescopic view.

Hamid had been here an hour—two?—since shortly after Tines showed him his quarters.

The inside of his head felt like an abandoned battlefield. A monster had become his good buddy. The man he hated turned out to be the father he had wanted … and his mother now seemed an uncaring manipulator. And now I can never go back and ask you truly what you were, truly if you loved me.

He felt something wet on his face. One good thing about gravity, even a fiftieth of a gee: it cleared the tears from your eyes.

He must be very careful these next two years. There was much to learn, and even more to guess at. What was lie and what was truth? There were things about the story that … how could one human being be as important as Ravna and Tines claimed? Next to the Transhumans, no human equivalent could count for much.

It might well be that these two believed the story they told him—and that could be the most frightening possibility of all. They talked about the Great Man as though he were some sort of messiah. Hamid had read of similar things in Earth history: twentieth-century Nazis longing for Hitler, the fanatics of the Afghan Jihad scheming to bring back their Imam. The story Larry got from the ansible could be true, and the Great Man might have been accomplice to the murder of a thousand worlds.

Hamid found himself laughing. Where does that put me? Could the clone of a monster rise above the original?

“What’s funny, Hamid?” Tines had entered the bridge quietly. Now he settled himself on the table and posts around Hamid. The one that had been the Blab sat just a meter away.

“Nothing. Just thinking.”

They sat for several minutes in silence, watching the sky. There was a wavering there—like hot air over a stove—the tiniest evidence of the fields that formed the ram around them. He glanced at the tines. Four of them were looking out the windows. The other two looked back at him, their eyes as dark and soft as the Blab’s had ever been.

“Please don’t think badly of Ravna,” Tines said. “She had a real thing going with the almost-you of before … . They loved each other very much.”

“I guessed.”

The two heads turned back to the sky. These next two years he must watch this creature, try to decide … . But suspicions aside, the more he saw of Tines, the more he liked him. Hamid could almost imagine that he had not lost the Blab, but gained five of her siblings. And the bigmouth had finally become a real person.

The companionable silence stretched on. After a moment, the one that had been the Blab edged across the table and bumped her head against his shoulder. Hamid hesitated, then stroked her neck. They watched the sun and the fleck of blue a moment more. “You know,” said Tines, but in the femvoice that was the Blab’s favorite, “I will miss that place. And most of all … I will miss the cats and the dogs.”