IGMS Issue 16 Read online

  Years later Sam would think of all kinds of things he should have said. Forgiveness. Apology. Affection. Something. But he said nothing, just left and went out to the clearing and waited for the helicopter. Father didn't come to try to say good-bye. The chopper pilot came, unloaded, left the chopper to talk to some people. He must have talked to Father because when he came back he handed Sam a check. Plenty to fly home, and stay in good places during the layovers, and buy some new clothes that didn't have jungle stains on them. The check was the last thing Sam had from his father. Before he came home from that rig, the Venezuelans bought a hardy and virulent strain of syphilis on the black market, one that could be passed by casual contact, and released it on Guyana. Sam's father was one of the first million to die, so fast that he didn't even write.

  PAGE, ARIZONA

  The State of Deseret had only sixteen helicopters, all desperately needed for surveying, spraying, and medical emergencies. So Governor Sam Monson rarely risked them on government business. This time, though, he had no choice. He was only fifty-five, and in good shape, so maybe he could have made the climb down into Glen Canyon and back up the other side. But Carpenter wouldn't have made it, not in a wheelchair, and Carpenter had a right to be here. He had a right to see what the red-rock Navaho desert had become.

  Deciduous forest, as far as the eye could see.

  They stood on the bluff where the old town of Page had once been, before the dam was blown up. The Navahos hadn't tried to reforest here. It was their standard practice. They left all the old European towns unplanted, like pink scars in the green of the forest. Still, the Navahos weren't stupid. They had come to the last stronghold of European science, the University of Deseret at Zarahemla, to find out how to use the heavy rainfalls to give them something better than perpetual floods and erosion. It was Carpenter who gave them the plan for these forests, just as it was Carpenter whose program had turned the old Utah deserts into the richest farmland in America. The Navahos filled their forests with bison, deer, and bears. The Mormons raised crops enough to feed five times their population. That was the European mind-set, still in place, enough is never enough. Plant more, grow more, you'll need it tomorrow.

  "They say he has two hundred thousand soldiers," said Carpenter's computer voice. Carpenter could speak, Sam had heard, but he never did. Preferred the synthesized voice. "They could all be right down there, and we'd never see them."

  "They're much farther south and east. Strung out from Phoenix to Santa Fe, so they aren't too much of a burden on the Navahos."

  "Do you think they'll buy supplies from us? Or send an army in to take them?"

  "Neither," said Sam. "We'll give our surplus grain as a gift."

  "He rules all of Latin America, and he needs gifts from a little remnant of the U.S. in the Rockies?"

  "We'll give it as a gift, and be grateful if he takes it that way."

  "How else might he take it?"

  "As tribute. As taxes. As ransom. The land is his now, not ours."

  "We made the desert live, Sam. That makes it ours."

  "There they are."

  They watched in silence as four horses walked slowly from the edge of the woods, out onto the open ground of an ancient gas station. They bore a litter between them, and were led by two -- not Indians -- Americans. Sam had schooled himself long ago to use the word American to refer only to what had once been known as Indians, and to call himself and his own people Europeans. But in his heart he had never forgiven them for stealing his identity, even though he remembered very clearly where and when that change began.

  It took fifteen minutes for the horses to bring the litter to him, but Sam made no move to meet them, no sign that he was in a hurry. That was also the American way now, to take time, never to hurry, never to rush. Let the Europeans wear their watches. Americans told time by the sun and stars.

  Finally the litter stopped, and the men opened the litter door and helped her out. She was smaller than before, and her face was tightly wrinkled, her hair steel-white.

  She gave no sign that she knew him, though he said his name. The Americans introduced her as Nuestra Senora. Our Lady. Never speaking her most sacred name: Virgem America.

  The negotiations were delicate but simple. Sam had authority to speak for Deseret, and she obviously had authority to speak for her son. The grain was refused as a gift, but accepted as taxes from a federated state. Deseret would be allowed to keep its own government, and the borders negotiated between the Navahos and the Mormons eleven years before were allowed to stand.

  Sam went further. He praised Quetzalcoatl for coming to pacify the chaotic lands that had been ruined by the Europeans. He gave her maps that his scouts had prepared, showing strongholds of the prairie raiders, decommissioned nuclear missiles, and the few places where stable governments had been formed. He offered, and she accepted, a hundred experienced scouts to travel with Quetzalcoatl at Deseret's expense, and promised that when he chose the site of his North American capital, Deseret would provide architects and engineers and builders to teach his American workmen how to build the place themselves.

  She was generous in return. She granted all citizens of Deseret conditional status as adopted Americans, and she promised that Quetzalcoatl's armies would stick to the roads through the northwest Texas panhandle, where the grasslands of the newest New Lands project were still so fragile that an army could destroy five years of labor just by marching through. Carpenter printed out two copies of the agreement in English and Spanish, and Sam and Virgem America signed both.

  Only then, when their official work was done, did the old woman look up into Sam's eyes and smile. "Are you still a heretic, Sam?"

  "No," he said. "I grew up. Are you still a virgin?"

  She giggled, and even though it was an old lady's broken voice, he remembered the laughter he had heard so often in the village of Agualinda, and his heart ached for the boy he was then, and the girl she was. He remembered thinking then that forty-two was old.

  "Yes, I'm still a virgin," she said. "God gave me my child. God sent me an angel, to put the child in my womb. I thought you would have heard the story by now."

  "I heard it," he said.

  She leaned closer to him, her voice a whisper. "Do you dream, these days?"

  "Many dreams. But the only ones that come true are the ones I dream in daylight."

  "Ah," she sighed. "My sleep is also silent."

  She seemed distant, sad, distracted. Sam also; then, as if by conscious decision, he brightened, smiled, spoke cheerfully. "I have grandchildren now."

  "And a wife you love," she said, reflecting his brightening mood. "I have grandchildren, too." Then she became wistful again. "But no husband. Just memories of an angel."

  "Will I see Quetzalcoatl?"

  "No," she said, very quickly. A decision she had long since made and would not reconsider. "It would not be good for you to meet face-to-face, or stand side by side. Quetzalcoatl also asks that in the next election, you refuse to be a candidate."

  "Have I displeased him?" asked Sam.

  "He asks this at my advice," she said. "It is better, now that his face will be seen in this land, that your face stay behind closed doors."

  Sam nodded. "Tell me," he said. "Does he look like the angel?"

  "He is as beautiful," she said. "But not as pure."

  Then they embraced each other and wept. Only for a moment. Then her men lifted her back into her litter, and Sam returned with Carpenter to the helicopter. They never met again.

  In retirement, I came to visit Sam, full of questions lingering from his meeting with Virgem America. "You knew each other," I insisted. "You had met before." He told me all this story then.

  That was thirty years ago. She is dead now, he is dead, and I am old, my fingers slapping these keys with all the grace of wooden blocks. But I write this sitting in the shade of a tree on the brow of a hill, looking out across woodlands and orchards, fields and rivers and roads, where once the land was rock a
nd grit and sagebrush. This is what America wanted, what it bent our lives to accomplish. Even if we took twisted roads and got lost or injured on the way, even if we came limping to this place, it is a good place, it is worth the journey, it is the promised, the promising land.

  Special thanks to Tor for giving permission for IGMS to reprint The Folk of the Fringe which is still in print.

  InterGalactic Interview With Vernor Vinge Part 2

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  The starting point for this interview is an article called "The Coming Technological Singularity" which you may quickly find by doing an internet search on Vernor Vinge's name. It was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Otherwise, what you need to know by way of an introduction is that Vernor Vinge has been publishing science fiction since 1965. One early story of his, "The Accomplice" (1967) is remarkably prophetic. Not only does it describe desktop computers and CGI animation, but suggests that this could be used to make a movie out of The Lord of the Rings. His "True Names" (1981) is one of the first stories about cyberspace, hackers, and virtual reality. He has won Hugo Awards for A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), "Fast Times at Fairmont High" (2002), "The Cookie Monster" (2004) and Rainbows End (2006). Marooned in Realtime (1996) won the Prometheus Award.

  He is a retired professor of mathematics from San Diego State University. At the beginning of the Wikipedia entry about him, he is quoted from the Singularity article as saying, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

  (Part One of this interview appeared in issue 15)

  Part Two

  VINGE: When I was a child, the thing that first attracted me to science fiction -- before I had access to sf magazines or even had a name for the genre -- was that occasionally I would read a story or see a movie where the world was different at the end than it was at the beginning. Being just seven or eight years old, I didn't have very wide horizons, but in the early 1950s it was very rare that I could find a story in which the world was different at the end of the story, unless it turned out to be a dream and at the end the protagonist wakes up and everything is as before. (I really disliked that kind of story!)

  Then someone, probably one of my parents, pointed out, "You know, there's a name for what you're looking for. It's called science fiction."

  SCHWEITZER: Even then, particularly in the movies, there was a lot of science fiction which put the world back in order at the end. Consider Odd John, for example. In most of the early superman stories, the superman has to die at the end. I suppose the most extreme example is C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, where they fly to Mars and at the end decide never to do that again. It was even a change in science fiction that writers started to leave the world in a different condition at the end.

  VINGE: I hadn't realized that! Of course, the perspective of my autobiographical example is of a six or seven or eight year old. I wasn't aware that there were stories that were open about the future and also sf stories that closed themselves off. In some cases, there are defensible artistic reasons such closing. I really loved "Flowers for Algernon," and I don't think its ending is dictated by the sort of societal expectations of the much earlier stories.

  SCHWEITZER: Well it certainly closed things off for the individuals in the story. Certainly for the mouse.

  VINGE: [Laughs.]

  SCHWEITZER: So, when did you first realize that you wanted to write science fiction, and what did you do about it?

  VINGE: My childhood memories are weak on dates, but I've been told that the first book I ever read was Heinlein's Between Planets, when I was in the second grade. I think my parents were getting worried about me: was this kid ever going to learn to read? On the other hand, the first story I ever tried to write was "Rocketship X-54." What year do you think that was written in?

  SCHWEITZER: About the same time Rocketship X-M came out, which would make it about 1949.

  VINGE: I think it was probably in the third grade, so 1951 or 1952.

  SCHWEITZER: Then the movie was a couple years old when you saw it.

  VINGE: I doubt that I actually saw the movie back then; my parents didn't even let me go The War of the Worlds. I think my title may have come from my fascination with the early X-planes, and the year "1954," which probably sounded almost as wondrously futuristic to me as "1955."

  SCHWEITZER: Rocketship X-M was a knockoff of Destination Moon, which the producers got into theaters first.

  VINGE: Alas, I didn't even see Destination Moon until many years later. My intent with the Rocketship X-54 was to tell the story of the first human expedition to the moon. The twist was to be that the explorers run into Venusian explorers there. I didn't finish that story. In fact, I was never able to finish any of my science-fiction until about the tenth grade -- and that story took a year or two to complete. I realized later that it was very similar to John Campbell's "Forgetfulness." I'm so glad I never sent it to him. The similarity was not deliberate; I was just immersed in the culture of science fiction.

  SCHWEITZER: Maybe if you had submitted that story to John Campbell, he might have been flattered.

  VINGE: If I had been John, I would have thought, "Boy, this is really a derivative story. This guy obviously worked very hard on it, but I hope he can come up with more original ideas in the future."

  SCHWEITZER: Where did you sell your first story? Was it to Analog?

  VINGE: The first sale, which was the second (saleable) story I wrote,

  was "Apartness." I sold it to New Worlds when Michael Moorcock was the

  editor there. "Apartness" was about the colonization of the Palmer

  Peninsula in Antarctica by refugees from South Africa.

  The summer after I graduated from high school, I wrote my first story that ever sold, "Bookworm, Run!" That's about Intelligence Amplification applied to a chimpanzee. I sold it to John Campbell at Analog. That was really an ego-trip for me, in some ways bigger than my first sale. John rejected the story with a long letter about what was wrong with the story. Well, I recognized the subtext message to be 'Fix this and try again!' I dutifully revised the story, and I think he rejected it again with another long letter. I still am extraordinarily proud of that interchange and the fact that he eventually bought the story. (Commercial plug: I haven't written that much short fiction. Almost all of it is in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, from Tor Books.)

  SCHWEITZER: Were you primarily an Astounding reader all this time, not a Galaxy reader or a Fantasy & Science Fiction reader?

  VINGE: Eventually I became very, very enamored with Galaxy and with F&SF, and I had good collections of them, but as a child from circa age 12 to 15, my magazine reading was pretty exclusively Astounding. And of course during that time I was reading Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein, from the library.

  SCHWEITZER: One of the interesting things about the canon of that time was that for people who grew up in the '50s or the '60s, what we were reading, at first, was very likely science fiction that was written before we were born, not the contemporary stuff. Kids today don't seem to do that.

  VINGE: Well, the stuff I was reading in Astounding was of course contemporary.

  SCHWEITZER: But before you got to the magazines, you would have been reading earlier Heinlein, or whatever. I figured this out for myself once. Of the first ten science fiction books I read, only one was first published within my lifetime. That was James Blish's The Seedling Stars, which came out when I was three. (1955).

  VINGE: Most of what I was reading was not that old.

  SCHWEITZER: I mean the Golden Age Astounding stuff from the early '40s.

  VINGE: Yeah, but I was born in '44.

  SCHWEITZER: But by the time you were old enough to read, say, Beyond This Horizon --
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  VINGE: Beyond This Horizon was before I was born, but that was not one of the early Heinleins that I read. The juveniles that he was writing were from the late 1940s and the 1950s. So those were contemporary to me. It is true that I was originally rather casual about reading Astounding. Then I realized that the stories that I really loved, the novels, most of them had come out in Astounding first. So in my case, your observation about pre-birth influence really goes back to about 1939 or 1940. In other words, I did not and essentially never have discovered much really enjoyable science fiction from before about 1940. There are a few stories from 1939 that I enjoyed, and a few stories from earlier that I discovered much later.

  SCHWEITZER: Like Campbell's "Forgetfulness." That's from 1937.

  VINGE: It may be that I never read that.

  SCHWEITZER: You doubtless read it in Adventures in Time and Space.

  VINGE: Aha! Talk about forgetfulness! Yes, you must be right. I did have access to that anthology. So, except for the Healy and McComas Adventures in Time and Space -- and there may be a Conklin book --

  SCHWEITZER: The Big Book of Science Fiction from 1946, the other major breakthrough anthology.

  VINGE: Yes. I stand corrected. I had access to such anthologies and I read them assiduously. That probably didn't predate reading Between Planets but my reading the anthologies certainly came before I discovered the magazines. I remember being in awe of Astounding when I realized how many of my favorite stories had originally appear there. That does nail it down. Even so, I was not impressed by most stories from before 1940. And I didn't run into things like Stapledon's The Star Maker until late in high school. I didn't see some of my now-most-favorite pre-1940 stories until much later, in particular Kipling's A.B.C. stories. I am not aware of seeing those until the late '90s -- and being thoroughly humbled by the discovery. He actually had discovered the Heinlein "door dilated" principle and exploited it to the hilt, and this was when, 1907?

  SCHWEITZER: I was born in 1952, which makes me eight years younger than you, so if I was reading the same things you were, things like Heinlein's "Universe" and The Martian Chronicles, which all predated my lifetime.