The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

  Ilse went further: she studied her own body for clues as to its purpose. Much of her body was filled with a substance she must keep within a few degrees of absolute zero. Several leads disappeared into this mass. Except for her thermometers, however, she had no feeling in this part of her body. Now she raised the temperature in this section a few thousandths of a degree, a change well within design specifications, but large enough for her to sense. Comparing her observations and the section’s mass with her chemical analysis programs, Ilse concluded that the mysterious area was a relatively homogeneous body of frozen water, doped with various impurities. It was interesting information, but no matter how she compared it with her memories she could not see any significance to it.

  Ilse floated on—and on. The period of time between the midcourse maneuver and the next important event on her schedule was longer than Man’s experience with agriculture had been on Earth.

  As the centuries passed, the two closely set stars that were her destination became brighter until, a thousand years from Alpha Centauri, she decided to begin her search for planets in the system. Ilse turned her telescope on the brighter of the two stars…call it Able. She was still thirty-five thousand times as far from Able—and the smaller star…call it Baker—as Earth is from Sol. Even to her sharp eye, Able didn’t show as a disk but rather as a diffraction pattern: a round blob of light—many times larger than the star’s true disk—surrounded by a ring of light. The faint gleam of any planets would be lost in that diffraction pattern. For five years Ilse watched the pattern, analyzed it with one of her most subtle programs. Occasionally she slid occulting plates into the telescope and studied the resulting, distorted, pattern. After five years she had found suggestive anomalies in the diffraction pattern, but no definite signs of planets.

  No matter. Patient Ilse turned her telescope a tiny fraction of a degree, and during the next five years she watched Baker. Then she switched back to Able. Fifteen times Ilse repeated this cycle. While she watched, Baker completed two revolutions about Able, and the stars’ maximum mutual separation increased to nearly a tenth of a degree. Finally Ilse was certain: she had discovered a planet orbiting Baker, and perhaps another orbiting Able. Most likely they were both gas giants. No matter: she knew that any small, inner planets would still be lost in the glare of Able and Baker.

  There remained less than nine hundred years before she coasted through the Centauran system.

  Ilse persisted in her observations. Eventually she could see the gas giants as tiny spots of light—not merely as statistical correlations in her carefully collected diffraction data. Four hundred years out, she decided that the remaining anomalies in Able’s diffraction pattern must be another planet, this one at about the same distance from Able as Earth is from Sol. Fifteen years later she made a similar discovery for Baker.

  If she were to investigate both of these planets she would have to plan very carefully. According to her design specifications, she had scarcely the maneuvering capability left to investigate one system. But Ilse’s navigation system had survived the centuries better than expected, and she estimated that a survey of both planets might still be possible.

  Three hundred and fifty years out, Ilse made a relatively large course correction, better than two hundred meters per second. This change was essentially a matter of pacing: It would delay her arrival by four months. Thus she would pass near the planet she wished to investigate and, if no landing were attempted, her path would be precisely bent by Able’s gravitational field and she would be cast into Baker’s planetary system.

  Now Ilse had less than eight hundred meters per second left in her rocket—less than one percent of her velocity relative to Able and Baker. If she could be at the right place at the right time, that would be enough, but otherwise…

  ILSE PLOTTED THE ORBITS of the bodies she had detected more and more accurately. Eventually she discovered several more planets: a total of three for Able, and four for Baker, But only her two prime candidates—call them Able II and Baker II—were at the proper distance from their suns.

  Eighteen months out, Ilse sighted moons around Able II. This was good news. Now she could accurately determine the planet’s mass, and so refine her course even more. Ilse was now less than fifty astronomical units from Able, and eighty from Baker. She had no trouble making spectroscopic observations of the planets. Her prime candidates had plenty of oxygen in their atmospheres—though the farther one, Baker II, seemed deficient in water vapor. On the other hand, Able II had complex carbon compounds in its atmosphere, and its net color was blue green. According to Ilse’s damaged memory, these last were desirable features.

  The centuries had shrunk to decades, then to years, and finally to days. Ilse was within the orbit of Able’s gas giant. Ten million kilometers ahead her target swept along a nearly circular path about its sun, Able. Twenty-seven astronomical units beyond Able gleamed Baker.

  But Ilse kept her attention on that target, Able II. Now she could make out its gross continental outlines. She selected a landing site, and performed a two hundred meter per second burn. If she chose to land, she would come down in a greenish, beclouded area.

  Twelve hours to contact. Ilse checked each of her subminds one last time. She deleted all malfunctioning circuits, and reassembled herself as a single mind out of what remained. Over the centuries, one third of all her electrical components had failed, so that besides her lost memories, she was not nearly as bright as she had been when launched. Nevertheless, with her subminds combined she was much cleverer than she had been during the cruise. She needed this greater alertness, because in the hours and minutes preceding her encounter with Able II, she would do more analysis and make more decisions than ever before.

  One hour to contact. Ilse was within the orbit of her target’s outer moon. Ahead loomed the tentative destination, a blue and white crescent two degrees across. Her landing area was around the planet’s horizon. No matter. The important task for these last moments was a biochemical survey—at least that’s what her surviving programs told her. She scanned the crescent, looking for traces of green through the clouds. She found a large island in a Pacific-sized ocean, and began the exquisitely complex analysis necessary to determine the orientation of amino acids. Every fifth second, she took one second to re-estimate the atmospheric densities. The problems seemed even more complicated than her training exercises back in Earth orbit.

  Five minutes to contact. She was less than forty thousand kilometers out, and the planet’s hazy limb filled her sky. In the next ten seconds she must decide whether or not to land on Able II. Her ten-thousand-year mission was at stake here. For once Ilse landed, she knew that she would never fly again. Without the immense booster that had pushed her out along this journey, she was nothing but a brain and an entry shield and a chunk of frozen water. If she decided to bypass Able II, she must now use a large portion of her remaining propellants to accelerate at right angles to her trajectory. This would cause her to miss the upper edge of the planet’s atmosphere, and she would go hurtling out of Able’s planetary system. Thirteen months later she would arrive in the vicinity of Baker, perhaps with enough left in her rocket to guide herself into Baker II’s atmosphere. But, if that planet should be inhospitable, there would be no turning back; she would have to land there, or else coast on into interstellar darkness.

  Ilse weighed the matter for three seconds and concluded that Able II satisfied every criterion she could recall, while Baker II seemed a bit too yellow, a bit too dry.

  Ilse turned ninety degrees and jettisoned the small rocket that had given her so much trouble. At the same time she ejected the telescope which had served her so well. She floated indivisible, a white biconvex disk, twelve meters in diameter, fifteen tons in mass.

  She turned ninety degrees more to look directly back along her trajectory. There was not much to see now that she had lost her scope, but she recognized the point of light that was Earth’s sun and wondered again what had been on all those pro
grams that she had forgotten.

  Five seconds. Ilse closed her eye and waited.

  Contact began as a barely perceptible acceleration. In less than two seconds that acceleration built to two hundred and fifty gravities. This was beyond Ilse’s experience, but she was built to take it: her body contained no moving parts and—except for her fusion reactor—no empty spaces. The really difficult thing was to keep her body from turning edgewise and burning up. Though she didn’t know it, Ilse was repeating—on a grand scale—the landing technique that men had used so long ago. But Ilse had to dissipate more than eight hundred times the kinetic energy of any returning Apollo capsule. Her maneuver was correspondingly more dangerous, but since her designers could not equip her with a rocket powerful enough to decelerate her, it was the only option.

  Now Ilse used her wits and every dyne in her tiny electric thrusters to arc herself about Able II at the proper attitude and altitude. The acceleration rose steadily toward five hundred gravities, or almost five kilometers per second in velocity lost every second. Beyond that Ilse knew that she would lose consciousness. Just centimeters away from her body the air glowed at fifty thousand degrees. The fireball that surrounded her lit the ocean seventy kilometers below as with daylight.

  Four hundred and fifty gravities. She felt a cryostat shatter, and one branch of her brain short through. Still Ilse worked patiently and blindly to keep her body properly oriented. If she had calculated correctly, there were less than five seconds to go now.

  She came within sixty kilometers of the surface, then rose steadily back into space. But now her velocity was only seven kilometers per second. The acceleration fell to a mere fifteen gravities, then to zero. She coasted back through a long ellipse to plunge, almost gently, into the depths of Able II’s atmosphere.

  At twenty thousand meters altitude, Ilse opened her eye and scanned the world below. Her lens had been cracked, and several of her gestalt programs damaged, but she saw green and knew her navigation hadn’t been too bad.

  It would have been a triumphant moment if only she could have remembered what she was supposed to do after she landed.

  At ten thousand meters, Ilse popped her paraglider from the hull behind her eye. The tough plastic blossomed out above her, and her fall became a shallow glide. Ilse saw that she was flying over a prairie spotted here and there by forest. It was near sunset and the long shadows cast by trees and hills made it easy for her to gauge the topography.

  Two thousand meters. With a glide ratio of one to four, she couldn’t expect to fly more than another eight kilometers. Ilse looked ahead, saw a tiny forest, and a stream glinting through the trees. Then she saw a glade just inside the forest, and some vagrant memory told her this was an appropriate spot. She pulled in the paraglider’s forward lines and slid more steeply downwards. As she passed three or four meters over the trees surrounding the glade, Ilse pulled in the rear lines, stalled her glider, and fell into the deep, moist grass. Her dun and green paraglider collapsed over her charred body so that she might be mistaken for a large black boulder covered with vegetation.

  The voyage that had crossed one hundred centuries and four light-years was ended.

  ILSE SAT IN the gathering twilight and listened. Sound was an undreamed of dimension to her: tiny things burrowing in their holes, the stream gurgling nearby, a faint chirping in the distance. Twilight ended and a shallow fog rose in the dark glade. Ilse knew her voyaging was over. She would never more again. No matter. That had been planned, she was sure. She knew that much of her computing machinery—her mind—had been destroyed in the landing. She would not survive as a conscious being for more than another century or two. No matter.

  What did matter was that she knew that her mission was not completed, and that the most important part remained, else the immense gamble her makers had undertaken would finally come to nothing. That possibility was the only thing which could frighten Ilse. It was part of her design.

  She reviewed all the programmed memories that had survived the centuries and the planetary entry, but discovered nothing new. She investigated the rest of her body, testing her parts in a thorough, almost destructive, way she never would have dared while still centuries from her destination. She discovered nothing new. Finally she came to that load of ice she had carried so far. With one of her cryostats broken, she couldn’t keep it at its proper temperature for more than a few years. She recalled the apparently useless leads that disappeared into that mass. There was only one thing left to try.

  Ilse turned down her cryostats, and waited as the temperature within her climbed. The ice near her small fusion reactor warmed first. Somewhere in the frozen mass a tiny piece of metal expanded just far enough to complete a circuit, and Ilse discovered that her makers had taken one last precaution to insure her reliability. At the base of the icy hulk, next to the reactor, they had placed an auxiliary memory unit, and now Ilse had access to it. Her designers had realized that no matter what dangers they imagined, there would be others, and so they had decided to leave this back-up cold and inactive till the very end. And the new memory unit was quite different from her old ones, Ilse vaguely realized. It used optical rather than magnetic storage.

  Now Ilse knew what she must do. She warmed a cylindrical tank filled with frozen amniotic fluid to thirty-seven degrees centigrade. From the store next to the cylinder, she injected a single microorganism into the tank. In a few minutes she would begin to suffuse blood through the tank.

  It was early morning now and the darkness was moist and cool. Ilse tried to probe her new memory further, but was balked. Apparently the instructions were delivered according to some schedule to avoid unnecessary use of the memory. Ilse reviewed what she had learned, and decided that she would know more in another nine months.

  “Long Shot” was many things to me. I wanted the apotheosis of all the planetary missions that dominated space exploration in the twentieth century. I wanted to describe the smallest colony mission that could ever be attempted. (In fact, my only authorly reason for “blowing up” the sun was to justify such a screwball attempt.)

  The part of the adventure that I show is certainly a “long shot,” but it’s not the most desperate part of the mission. At the end of the story, we know that Ilse is bearing human zygotes. Consider her size: She could contain many zygotes, but nowhere near the mass to bring them all to term. And what will she do with the babies? How to feed them, how to teach them? Surely, humanity did not expect that there was an alien civilization at the target. (Hmm, maybe they did! We only know what Ilse remembers. An alien race would be a cop-out, but it would make writing a sequel more fun.) Hey, I really do have some ideas about Ilse’s future (and that is the true “long shot” behind the title). The unwritten sequel would probably take place about ten years later, and a good title might be “Firstborn Son.”

  Of course, Ilse is far from being the smallest possible interstellar probe. Early in the twentieth century, Svante Arrhenius suggested that micro-organisms might survive interstellar voyages, spreading some forms of life throughout the universe. Even if done deliberately, such “probes” would be slow and limited things. Since writing “Long Shot,” I’ve seen discussions of directed, useful probes much smaller than Ilse: Robert L. Forward has described an interstellar probe massing just a few grams (“Starwisp,” Hughes Research Labs Research Report 555, June 1983). Mark Zimmermann has combined that idea with AI to suggest sentient probes in the same mass range. Look around you! Similar travelers may be snugged away in that pebble on the driveway, in the odd thistledown floating across the yard.

  APARTNESS

  Michael Moorcock bought “Apartness” for New Worlds SF. It was my first sale (though “Bookworm, Run!” was written earlier). “Apartness” was later anthologized by Don Wollheim and Terry Carr in one of their best-of-the-year collections. Such success was a dream come true for this beginning writer. But I wonder if the story’s success had much connection with the question that originally brought me to write it: Wh
y are there no “Eskimos”—no long-established human societies—in Antarctica? Is it too remote from potential colonists, or is the place that much less hospitable than the arctic? I did some reading, concluded that both reasons had some virtue. There might be a few places on the continent that could support pretechnical human settlers, but those colonists would need real motivation. So the question was to find such motivation. Given the context of 1964, there was a terrible possibility—and the story came close to writing itself.

  ____________________

  …But he saw a light! On the coast. Can’t you understand what that means?” Diego Ribera y Rodrigues leaned across the tiny wooden desk to emphasize his point. His adversary sat in the shadows and avoided the weak glow of the whale oil lamp hung from the cabin’s ceiling. During the momentary pause in the argument, Diego could hear the wind keening through the masts and rigging above them. He was suddenly, painfully conscious of the regular rolling of the deck and slow oscillations of the swinging lamp. But he continued to glare at the man opposite him, and waited for an answer. Finally Capitán Manuel Delgado tilted his head out of the shadows. He smiled unpleasantly. His narrow face and sharp black moustache made him look like what he was: a master of power—political, military, and personal.

  “It means,” Delgado answered, “people. So what?”