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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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He finished the message and folded the tripod. “Let’s go. I’ll bet you iron that was one of our own spies reporting that someone was signaling the enemy from here. If Profirio doesn’t land a shell on us, we’ll be shot by our own people.”
They scrambled out of the brush and trotted across open ground. Svir dropped the signaler; they were no longer redhanded. He guided Cor by the waist. She paid little attention to the ground, but kept her face turned toward the river valley. On her shoulder, Ancho made whimpering noises.
Cor stopped, and Svir followed her gaze. Across the valley, at the top of the far crest, a signal lamp winked on and off. Cor took her book out and recorded every letter. The message was short: just two words, and the first was nonsense. More military signals? He felt Cor shrug. “I think the friend yonder plays Tatja’s game; maybe she can translate.” They watched for nearly half a minute, but there was nothing more. Further up the hill they were stopped by a party of guards. Ancho was either asleep or afraid, because he didn’t radiate anything effective. Svir identified himself as the astronomer royal and demanded to be taken to the command area to report a “disgraceful breach of security.”
Fifteen minutes later they walked through the light trap of the command tent. Though large and well appointed, the interior had a crudeness that labeled it provincial. A single oil lamp hung from the center pole. Svir and Cor walked past the officers and guards who sat bleary-eyed behind the queen. Tatja’s face was strangely slack. She glanced up and didn’t seem to recognize them. What had happened? Svir looked at the provincials. Nothing strange there. Apparently she had been talking to the young underofficer who faced her across the camp table.
Cor handed her the notebook. She stared at the message for a long moment: JOLLE JESTS. Her slack expression was replaced by a faint smile. She looked up at them, then at the fellow
standing on the other side of the table. She spoke very softly. “We were wrong, Cor. There are two of them.”
Svir looked more carefully at the other man. There were enough bars on his sleeve to make him very high ranking. His chair was set ahead of the provincial generals. He returned Svir’s gaze with a puzzled frown. Then he smiled and leaned forward. His voice was low. “How many more are there like you three?”
Tatja replied just as softly, “How many more are there like you two?”
“Just we two. You see, I’m a gendarme, a policeman. The thing called Profirio is—a monster.”
I
t was said Riverside Road in Picchiu Province passed through the most beautiful country in the world. Svir did not dispute the assertion. The road ran along the Picchiu River, straight through an open forest whose trees often extended their branches to form a roof across the road, a roof that scattered green and gold highlights on the pavement.
They were nearly ten thousand feet above sea level, and though the air was thin, it was wonderfully crisp, and dry. For the first time since they had left Bayfast, Svir felt really clean. That morning, he and Cor had taken a quick swim in the icy waters of the Picchiu. Even now, he could hear the river rolling by just a few feet away. That sound would come louder as they moved upstream, as the valley became a gorge and the riverbed steepened.
It was when the forest roof parted that things got really impressive. Still miles away, the main peaks of the Doomsday Range rose
thousands of feet above the road. Except for a cloud band at the fourteen-thousand-foot level, every detail was visible. Much of the flanks were free of snow, and the bare bones of the young mountains stood black and gray and yellow and brown. Svir thought he could see every crystalline striation there. In the nearer distance, rugged hills ranged on either side of the river valley. Downstream those hills were gentle, covered by the same deciduous forest as the valley proper. Here they bore dark-needle looproot trees. And they were fast becoming too rugged for the looproot—great sections of bedrock were visible. The hillsides would soon become cliff faces.
But no matter how formidable the valley walls might seem, Svir knew there were paths there. And somewhere up there, the enemy’s infantry and supply trains made their slow, difficult way. By now those forces must be several miles behind the Crownesse-Sfierranyil army, since the Crown’s Men were using the wide, straight Riverside Road.
Through the trees bordering the road, Svir could see foot soldiers paralleling the cavalry and art‘ry. The Sfierranyil battle groups had been annexed to the crown’s, summing to nearly twenty-four thousand men and five hundred art’ry pieces. From their position in the second group, Svir and Cor couldn’t even see the head of the column—some thousand yards ahead. Before and behind them was the line of creaking supply and art’ry wagons, puffing skoats, and silent infantrymen. The line stretched nearly nine miles. It wasn’t the biggest army in the world, but the crown’s battle groups comprised the best men and equipment from the best military organization in the world.
And of all the people marching along this road, only four knew the real reason they were here. Last night he had witnessed the strangest revelation of his life.
Tatja had adjourned the conference in the tent. This was a relief to most of those present. They had been up all afternoon. Not even Haarm Wechsler had noticed that Tatja and Jolle stayed behind when the others left. Empty, the tent was like a cave. The flickering torch lighted four faces; everything beyond was darkness. Then Jolle revealed the secret behind all recorded history.
Humans were not accidental castaways on Tu. The world was a breeding farm. Slaughtering operations would begin as soon as the creature called Profirio regained contact with his superiors.
There had been a long silence. Svir felt himself caught in a nightmare that would disappear if he could only show its implausibility. “For food?” he asked.
The other shook his head. Svir wondered if Jolle were his real name. Profirio was certainly an alias, since it had a distinctive Upcoast flavor. “Well, then what does he want to kill us for?”
Jolle spoke a single word. “Golems.”
Svir looked blank.
Jolle stared at them for a moment. Then he spoke to Tatja. “There’s really only one of you, right?”
She nodded. “Yes, and I’ve looked.”
“Tough,” Jolle commiserated. He waved at Cor and Svir, and Tatja replied, “Fingers.”
“Hmm.,” said Jolle, “perhaps I should have, too.”
“But surrogate pain. Is there?”
“No. Ten trillion. Human too.” He nodded. “You’re it and foxily burnt.”
Tatja smiled shyly.
Svir’s jaw dropped. What were they talking about? Occasionally Tatja would carelessly address him in this fashion, but his blank look had always forced her to be silent or to make sense. Now she had found someone on her own level, and there was no need for “redundancy.”
He was about to ask for a translation, when Jolle said, “Excuse me Minister Hedrigs, Miss Ascuasenya. If you’re going to be in on this, you should know what’s going on. I just assumed from the way you worked together that you … . Perhaps golem is not the right word, but what shall I say? Have you ever heard this term?” He made a meaningless sound. “No? Well, not much Anglic would survive their processing, especially a term without referent. So I’ll use ‘golem’ to mean thinking machine. If your technology were just fifty years more advanced, you would think you knew exactly what I mean … . As it is, I am constrained to the vocabulary of superstition. Perhaps that’s for the best. A word like ‘golem’ will never give you the false sense of understanding you might have if … The golems I refer to are much more like magic than any science you can imagine. Even you, Marget. Until you have training, I suggest you accept the magical connotation. Then you won’t be fooled by false analogies with the thinking machines that you are capable of inventing … .”
Jolle had little accent, and he ordered his words properly. Nevertheless his speech was strange. He spoke rapidly, running one sentence into another. If a sentence were especially long, his
voice would drop and he would mumble the ending, as if the words were a redundant, painful ritual. His hands never stopped moving. The overall effect was impressive. Svir could imagine how the provincials had been overwhelmed by a man who spewed forth ideas faster than he could speak them.
Sometimes Tatja sounded like this, though she was perfectly capable of slow, natural exposition—after all, she had grown up here. Was Jolle’s manner an affectation, or was he unable to slow down? It had never occurred to Svir that it might be difficult to act stupid.
Jolle continued, “Through they are necessary to the function of society, golems are expensive to construct. There is, however, a cheap—and highly immoral—way of improvising golems. That method is to, hmm, destroy the souls of lesser creatures and so reduce them to golems. Profe—Profirio—is in the employ of an … organization that has spent two thousand years preparing this planet as a cheap golem-production plant. First they chose a resource-poor planet far from civilization. Then they seeded it with your ancestors, Minister Hedrigs, people they kidnapped from the backwaters of civilization. They wrecked your minds and bodies, dumped you here, and waited. My type lives a long time and can afford to be patient. Every so often, the organization sent a scout vehicle—crewed by the likes of Profirio—to analyze your population, technology.”
“Yes,” broke in Tatja. “Even without me, people would soon guess parts of this.”
“Really?”
“We observed one of your vehicles enter our system last year,” said Svir.
“You saw our drive stutter. You’re further along than they planned. But that was one of the reasons for these scouting missions. The want the planet’s population to reach a billion before they start harvesting; but just as important, they want you planet-bound—even an interplanetary flight technology would mean a drastic increase in the cost of operations. In one sense, their motivation is quite understandable: they want the maximum gain for the least effort.”
“What would then happen,” asked Cor, “if Profirio were successful?”
“Once he tells his superiors that you are ready for … harvest, they will set up a slaughterhouse on Thriy—Seraph you call it. One percent of your population will be spirited away every year. There is no escape from such abductions. It will all seem quite supernatural. Technological progress will stop; inventions will disappear, experiments explode. Other than that the organization will have no interest in what you do. As long as your population growth rate remains constant, the operation will show a profit.” He spread his hands in a gesture that seemed to put the prediction in the subjunctive.
“Their plans have come perilously close to success. But no matter how expensive artificial golems, and no matter how necessary golems are to our activities, only a small fraction of my kind are warped enough to buy ones produced by the slaughter of innocents. My friends and I have know for nearly a thousand years that Profirio’s organization was planning something like this, but we didn’t know where they were operating. I have spent four hundred years ingratiating myself to these criminal. Finally
my efforts were rewarded. I was hired to accompany Profirio on the present survey of your world.
“Things went well at first. We left our … scoutboat in orbit about six hundred thousand miles out. Any closer and if you had good telescopes—as it turns out you do—you would spot the thing immediately. We landed in the outback of Sfierranyi Province. I won’t go into the gruesome details, but I botched things and Profirio caught on to me. We had quite a fight out there in the hills last spring. I’m a little surprised the pyrotechnics were not observed—but a typhoon was moving inland at the time and I guess everybody was too busy to notice. Our battle destroyed almost all the equipment we had brought down for our survey.
“Our scoutboat is still out there, and the man who communicates with it will be victorious. I have one instrument left—it’s similar to your signalers. But to use it, I must know the exact position of the boat. I need a large telescope to accomplish that. We’ve continued the struggle with local resources.
“We both needed armies. We are persuasive individual—but the natives need some excuse to provoke them to war. Profirio chose to revolt against your central government. I did the logical thing and led the local militia on a campaign against the Rebels. It is blind luck that it worked out this way; that your forces and mine met as allies. But I apologize for using your army this afternoon to trick Profirio’s art’ry into revealing itself.
“Unless you people are hiding something, there are only two large observatories in this part of the world. That’s why we had the battle at Kotta-svo-Picchiu. Profirio got there first and was
hoping to hold out until dark. I had to destroy the scope to keep him from using it. With that gone, we are forced to go after the High Eye.”
“Excuse me,” spoke Svir, “but why did you bother with armies? On a good skoat you could have made it to O’rmouth in just a few days. Then you could have applied your powers of persuasion directly to the astronomers.”
Tatja answered that one. “Jolle and Profirio view armies as you might a shirt of armor. If one of them took off alone, the other could grab an army and use it to destroy a single unarmed opponent. It’s a question of balancing the speed with the risk.”
“That’s right,” said Jolle. “Eventually, Profirio may be reduced to personal action, but it will be a sign of desperation. He’ll have to persuade the Doomsdaymen to cooperate with him rather than us, and his identity will be clearly …” Jolle took a deep breath, interrupting his own rushing flow of speech. “One of us will control the High Eye—and the future of this planet will be determined.”

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