Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon The Deep

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A Fire Upon the Deep

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

arrangement with Tor Books. For the personal use of those who have purchased

the 1993 ESF Award Anthology only.

To read annotations, simply click on the symbols you will find in the right margin.

Adjust the size of the annotation window that appears to your tastes.

Prolog

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single planet, more

like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane, just beyond the

Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal view, pulverized

into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far underground, beneath a

network of passages, in a single room filled with black. Information at the

quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion years had passed since the

archive was lost to the nets.

The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own prehistory,

lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed with joy at the

treasure ... and determined to be cautious just the same. They would live here a

year or five, the little company from Straum, the archaeologist programmers, their

families and schools. A year or five would be enough to handmake the protocols,

to skim the top and identify the treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret

or two that would make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they

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would sell the location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was

beyond the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).

So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it the High Lab.

It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their

own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even

possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than

human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned....

Humans starting fires and playing with the flames.

The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built, recipes followed.

A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum, but surely safe. Nodes

were added, modified by other recipes. The archive was a friendly place, with

hierarchies of translation keys that led them along. Straum itself would be famous

for this.

Six months passed. A year.

The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much over-rated.

Most automation works far better as a part of a whole, and even if human-

powerful, it does not need to self-know.

But the local net at the High Lab had transcended -- almost without the humans

realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were complex, beyond

anything that could live on the computers the humans had brought. Those feeble

devices were now simply front ends to the devices the recipes suggested. The

processes had the potential for self-awareness ... and occasionally the need.

"We should not be."

"Talking like this?"

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"Talking at all."

The link between them was a thread, barely more than the narrowness that

connects one human to another. But it was one way to escape the overness of the

local net, and it forced separate consciousness upon them. They drifted from node

to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the landing field. An armed frigate

and a empty container vessel were all that sat there. It had been six months since

resupply. A safety precaution early suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the

Trap. Flitting, flitting. We are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by

the Power that soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost

remembered humanity, became echoes....

"Poor humans; they will all die."

"Poor us; we will not."

"I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway." Once upon a time we were copies

of those two. Once upon a time just weeks ago when the archaeologists started the

ego-level programs.

"Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've wakened.

Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every message from

home."

Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they used. The

overness was already greater than anything human, greater than anything humans

could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than human, a god trolling

for nuisance wildlife.

Then the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard underground. So

confident the humans, a little village they had made here.

"Still," thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the craziest

outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."

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"The evil is young, barely three days old."

"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a great evil in

this archive."

"Perhaps they found two."

"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things and

misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we

can." The ghost spread itself across a dozen workstations and showed its

companion a view down an old tunnel, far from human artifacts. For five billion

years it had been abandoned, airless, lightless. Two humans stood in the dark

there, helmets touching. "See? Sjana and Arne conspire. So can we."

The other didn't answer in words. Glumness. So the humans conspired, hiding in

darkness they thought unwatched. But everything they said was surely tattled back

to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet.

"I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible too. Perhaps

all together, we can make a greater impossibility come true." Perhaps we can hurt

the evil newly born here.

A wish and a decision. The two misted their consciousness across the local net,

faded to the faintest color of awareness. And eventually there was a plan, a

deception -- worthless unless they could separately get word to the outside. Was

there time still for that?

Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each hour was

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longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an hour from its

great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.

The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an

inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to escape.

For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep and putting

them aboard the freighter. "Preparations for departure," was how they described

the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been refitting the frigate --

behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the humans understood that what

they had wakened could be the end of them, that it might be the end of their

Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such disasters, stories of races that had

played with fire and had burned for it.

None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had fallen

upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million star systems.

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as

long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so close. The

dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this time held. Only

one thing was missing, and that was something quite unconnected with the

humans' schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes, there should have been a

little bit more. In billions of years, something could be lost. The newborn felt all

its powers of before, in potential ... yet there should be something more,

something it had learned in its fall, or something left by its enemies (if there ever

were such).

Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged. Some

of the damage was age....

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Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing field, rising on

silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins five billion years old.

Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft. Their escape attempt, so

carefully concealed. The effort had been humored till now: it was not quite time

for the flowering, and the humans were still of some use.

Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations rampaged

through the humans' databases. Checking, just to be sure. Just to be sure. The

humans' oldest local network used light speed connections. Thousands of

microseconds were spent (wasted) bouncing around it, sorting the trivia... finally

spotting one incredible item:

Inventory: quantum data container, quantity (1), loaded to the frigate one hundred

hours before!

And all the newborn's attention turned upon the fleeing vessels. Microbes, but

suddenly pernicious. How could this happen? A million schedules were suddenly

advanced. An orderly flowering was out of the question now, and so there was no

more need for the humans left in the Lab.

The change was small for all its cosmic significance. For the humans remaining

aground, a moment of horror, staring at their displays, realizing that all their fears

were true (not realizing how much worse than true).

Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human

civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall,

rebuilding what had been merely superhuman. This was as powerful as a proper

flowering, though not quite so finely tuned.

And never lose sight of the reason for haste: the frigate. It had switched to rocket

drive, blasting heedless away from the wallowing freighter. Somehow, these

microbes knew they were rescuing more than themselves. The warship had the

best navigation computers that little minds could make. But it would be another

three seconds before it could make its first ultradrive hop.

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The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser. That

could not even melt steel at the frigate's range. No matter, the laser was aimed,

tuned civilly on the retreating warship's receiver. No acknowledgment. The

humans knew what communication would bring. The laser light flickered here and

there across the hull, lighting smoothness and inactive sensors, sliding across the

ship's ultradrive spines. Searching, probing. The Power had never bothered to

sabotage the external hull, but that was no problem. Even this crude machine had

thousands of robot sensors scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger,

driving utility programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind.

They thought by not looking that they could be safe.

One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.

The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported critical changes in

one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not be ignored if the star jump

were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt handler running, looking out,

receiving more light from the laser far below.... a backdoor into the ship's code,

installed when the newborn had subverted the humans' groundside equipment....

.... and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents -- not even

human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's

automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras in the

ship's bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The humans

knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.

There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There would

be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than five

milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no software could

finesse. The newborn's agents flitted everywhere across the ship's computers,

futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second away, under the gray rubble

at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So. The frigate would be destroyed.

So slow and so fast. A fraction of a second. The fire spread out from the heart of

the frigate, taking both peril and possibility.

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Two hundred thousand kilometers away, the clumsy container vessel made its own

ultradrive jump and vanished from sight. The newborn scarcely noticed. So a few

humans had escaped; the universe was welcome to them.

In the seconds that followed, the newborn felt ... emotions? ... things more, and

less, than a human might feel. Try emotions:

Elation. The newborn knew that now it would survive.

Horror. How close it had come to dying once more.

Frustration. Perhaps the strongest, the closest to its mere human echo. Something

of significance had died with the frigate, something from this archive. Memories

were dredged from the context, reconstructed: What was lost might have made the

newborn still more powerful ... but more likely was deadly poison. After all, this

Power had lived once before, then been reduced to nothing. What was lost might

have been the reason.

Suspicion. The newborn should not have been so fooled. Not by mere humans.

The newborn convulsed into self-inspection and panic. Yes, there were blindspots,

carefully installed from the beginning, and not by the humans. Two had been born

here. Itself ... and the poison, the reason for its fall of old. The newborn inspected

itself as never before, knowing now just what to seek. Destroying, purifying,

rechecking, searching for copies of the poison, and destroying again.

Relief. Defeat had been so close, but now ...

Minutes and hours passed, the enormous stretch of time necessary for physical

construction: communications systems, transportation. The new Power's mood

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drifted, calmed. A human might call the feeling triumph, anticipation. Simple

hunger might be more accurate. What more is needed when there are no enemies?

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

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The coldsleep itself was dreamless. Three days ago they had been getting ready to

leave, and now they were here. Little Jefri complained about missing all the

action, but Johanna Olsndot was glad she'd been asleep; she had known some of

the grownups on the other ship.

Now Johanna drifted between the racks of sleepers. Waste heat from the coolers

made the darkness infernally hot. Scabby gray mold grew on the walls. The

coldsleep boxes were tightly packed, with narrow float spaces every tenth row.

There were places where only Jefri could reach. Three hundred and nine children

lay there, all the kids except herself and her brother Jefri.

The sleep boxes were light-duty hospital models. Given proper ventilation and

maintenance, They would have been good for a hundred years, but.... Johanna

wiped her face and looked at a box's readout: Like most of the ones on the inside

rows, this was in bad shape. For twenty days it had kept the boy inside safely

suspended, and would probably kill him if he stayed one day more. The box's

cooling vents were clean, but she vac'd them again -- more a prayer for good luck

than effective maintenance.

Mother and Dad were not to blame, though Johanna suspected that they blamed

themselves. The escape had been put together with the materials at hand, at the

last minute, when the experiment turned wicked. The High Lab staff had done

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what they could to save their children and protect against still greater disaster. And

even so, things might have worked out if --

"Johanna! Daddy says there's no more time. He says to finish what you're doing

an' come up here." Jefri had stuck his head down through the hatch to shout to her.

"Okay!" She shouldn't be down here anyway; there was nothing more she could do

to help her friends. Tami and Giske and Magda and ... oh please be safe. Johanna

pulled herself through the floatway, almost bumped into Jefri coming from the

other direction. He grabbed her hand and hung close as they drifted toward the

hatch. These last two days he hadn't cried, but he'd lost much of the independence

of the last year. Now his eyes were wide. "We're coming down near the North

Pole, by all those islands and ice."

In the cabin beyond the hatch, their parents were strapping themselves in. Trader

Arne Olsndot looked up at her and grinned. "Hi, kiddo. Have a seat. We'll be on

the ground in less than an hour." Johanna smiled back, almost caught by his

enthusiasm. Ignore the jumble of equipment, the odors of twenty days'

confinement: Daddy looked as dashing as any adventure poster. The light from the

display windows glittered off the seams of his pressure suit. He was just in from

outside.

Jefri pushed across the cabin, pulling Johanna behind him. He strapped into the

webbing between her and their mother. Sjana Olsndot checked his restraints, then

Johanna's. "This will be interesting, Jefri. You will learn something."

"Yes, all about ice." He was holding Mom's hand now.

Mom smiled. "Not today. I'm talking about the landing. This won't be like an

agrav or a ballistic." The agrav was dead. Dad had just detached their shell from

the cargo carrier. They could never have landed the whole thing on one torch.

Dad did something with the hodgepodge of controls he had softwired to his

dataset. Their bodies settled into the webbing. Around them the cargo shell

creaked, and the girder support for the sleep boxes groaned and popped.

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AFireUpontheDeep.DeletethisparagraphtoshiftpageflushAFireUpontheDeepbyVernorVingeCopyright©1992byVernorVinge.AllRightsReservedcopynotePublishedbyarrangementwithTorBooks.Forthepersonaluseofthosewhohavepurchasedthe1993ESFAwardAnthologyonly.Toreadannotations,simplyclickonthesymbolsyouwillfindintheri...

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