ctory. It was as if they were suddenly
part of a poorly calibrated automation, as if they were somebody's, um,
fingers.... No one can doubt they were playing in the Transcend. They found
something up there; a lost archive. But that is not the point." He stopped
talking for a long moment; Ravna almost thought he was finished. "You see,
just before leaving Straumli Main, we -- "
But now Pham Nuwen was talking too. "That's something I've been
wondering about. Everybody talks as though this Straumli Realm was doomed
the moment they began research in the Transcend. Look. I've played with
bugged software and strange weapons. I know you can get killed that way. But
it looks like the Straumers were careful to put their lab far away. They
were building something that could go very wrong, but apparently it was a
previously-tried experiment -- like just about everything Up Here. They
could stop the work any time it deviated from the records, right up to the
end. So how could they screw up so bad?"
The question stopped the Skroderider in its tracks. You didn't need a
doctorate in Applied Theology to know the answer. Even the damn Straumers
should have known the answer. But given Pham Nuwen's background, it was a
reasonable question. Ravna kept her mouth shut. The Skroderider's very
alienness might be more convincing to Pham than another lecture from her.
Blueshell dithered for a moment, no doubt using his skrode to help
assemble his arguments. When he finally spoke, he didn't seem irritated by
the interruption. "I hear several misconceptions, My Lady Pham." He seemed
to use the old Nyjoran honorific pretty indiscriminately. "Have you been
into the archive at Relay?"
Pham said yes. Ravna guessed he'd never been past the beginners' front
end.
"Then you know that an archive is a fundamentally vaster thing than the
database on a conventional local net. For practical purposes the big ones
can't even be duplicated. The major archives go back millions of years, have
been maintained by hundreds of different races -- most now extinct or
Transcended into Powers. Even the archive at Relay is a jumble, so huge that
indexing systems are laid on top of indexing systems. Only in the Transcend
could such a mass be well organized and even then only the Powers could
understand it."
"So?"
"There are thousands of archives in the Beyond -- tens of thousands if
you count the ones that have fallen into disrepair or dropped off the Net.
Along with unending trivia, they contain important secrets and important
lies. There are traps and snares." Millions of races played with the advice
that filtered unsolicited across the Net. Tens of thousands had been burned
thereby. Sometimes the damage was relatively minor, good inventions that
weren't quite right for the target environment. Sometimes it was malicious,
viruses that would jam a local net so thoroughly that a civilization must
restart from scratch. Where-Are-They-Now and Threats carried stories of
worse tragedies: planets kneedeep in replicant goo, races turned brainless
by badly programmed immune systems.
Pham Nuwen was wearing his skeptical expression. "Just test the stuff
at a safe remove. Be prepared for local disasters."
That would have brought most explanations to a stop. Ravna had to
admire the Skroderider: he paused, retreated to still more elementary terms.
"True, simple caution can prevent many disasters. And if your lab is in the
Middle or Low Beyond, such caution is all that is really needed -- no matter
how sophisticated the threat. But we all understand the nature of the
Zones...." Ravna had virtually no feel for Rider body language, but she
would have sworn that Blueshell was watching the barbarian expectantly,
trying to gauge the depth of Pham's ignorance.
The human nodded impatiently.
Blueshell continued, "In the Transcend, truly sophisticated equipment
can operate, devices substantially smarter than anyone down here. Of course,
almost any economic or military competition can be won by the side with
superior computing resources. Such can be had at the Top of the Beyond and
in the Transcend. Races are always migrating there, hoping to build their
utopias. But what do you do when your new creations may be smarter than you
are? It happens that there are limitless possibilities for disaster, even if
an existing Power does not cause harm. So there are unnumbered recipes for
safely taking advantage of the Transcend. Of course they can't be
effectively examined except in the Transcend. And run on devices of their
own description, the recipes themselves become sentient."
Understanding was beginning to glimmer across Pham Nuwen's face.
Ravna leaned forward, caught the redhead's attention. "There are
complex things in the archives. None of them is sentient, but some have the
potential, if only some naive young race will believe their promises. We
think that's what happened to Straumli Realm. They were tricked by
documentation that claimed miracles, tricked into building a transcendent
being, a Power -- but one that victimizes sophonts in the Beyond." She
didn't mention how rare such perversion was. The Powers were variously
malevolent, playful, indifferent -- but virtually all of them had better
uses for their time than exterminating cockroaches in the wild.
Pham Nuwen rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Okay, I guess I see. But I get
the feeling this is common knowledge. If it's this deadly, how did the
Straumli bunch get taken in?"
"Bad luck and criminal incompetence," the words popped out of her with
surprising force. She hadn't realized she was so bent by the Straumli thing;
somewhere inside, her old feelings for Straumli Realm were still alive.
"Look. Operations in the High Beyond and in the Transcend are dangerous.
Civilizations up there don't last long, but there will always be people who
try. Very few of the threats are actively evil. What happened to the
Straumers.... They ran across this recipe advertising wondrous treasure.
Quite possibly it had been lying around for millions of years, a little too
risky for other folks to try. You're right, the Straumers knew the dangers."
But it was a classic situation of balancing risks and choosing wrong.
Perhaps a third of Applied Theology was about how to dance near the flame
without getting incinerated. No one knew the details of the Straumli
debacle, but she could guess them from a hundred similar cases:
"So they set up a base in the Transcend at this lost archive -- if
that's what it was. They began implementing the schemes they found. You can
be sure they spent most of their time watching it for signs of deception. No
doubt the recipe was a series of more or less intelligible steps with a
clear takeoff point. The early stages would involve computers and programs
more effective than anything in the Beyond -- but apparently well-behaved."
"... Yeah. Even in the Slowness, a big program can be full of
surprises."
Ravna nodded. "And some of these would be near or beyond human
complexity. Of course, the Straumers would know this and try to isolate
their creations. But given a malign and clever design ... it should be no
surprise if the devices leaked onto the lab's local net and distorted the
information there. From then on, the Straumer's wouldn't have a chance. The
most cautious staffers would be framed as incompetent. Phantom threats would
be detected, emergency responses demanded. More sophisticated devices would
be built, and with fewer safeguards. Conceivably, the humans were killed or
rewritten before the Perversion even achieved transsapience."
There was a long silence. Pham Nuwen looked almost chastened. Yeah.
There's a lot you don't know, Buddy. Think on what Old One might have
planned for you.
Blueshell bent a tendril to taste a brown concoction that smelled like
seaweed. "Well told, My Lady Ravna. But there is one difference in the
present situation. It may be good fortune, and very important.... You see,
just before leaving Straumli Main, we attended a beach party among the
Lesser Riders. They had been little affected by events to that point; many
hadn't even noticed the destruction of independence at Straum. With luck,
they may be the last enslaved." His squeaky voice lowered an octave,
trailing into silence. "Where was I? Yes, the party. There was one fellow
there, a bit more lively than the average. Somewhere years past, he had
bonded with a traveler in a Straumli news service. Now he was acting as a
clandestine data drop, so humble that he wasn't even listed in that
service's own net....
"Anyway, the researchers at the Straumli lab -- a few of them at least
-- were not so incautious as you say. They suspected a perverse runaway, and
were determined to sabotage it."
This was news, but -- "Doesn't look like they had much success, does
it?"
"I am nodding agreement. They did not prevent it, but they did plan to
escape the laboratory planet with two starships. And they did get word of
their attempt into channels that ended with my acquaintance at the beach
party. And here is the important part: At least one of these ships was to
carry away some final elements of the Perversion's recipe -- before they
were incorporated into the design."
"Surely there were backups -- " began Pham Nuwen.
Ravna waved him silent. There had been enough grade-school explanations
for one night. This was incredible. She'd been following the news about
Straumli Realm as much as anyone. The Realm was the first High daughter
colony of Sjandra Kei; it was horrifying to see it destroyed. But nowhere in
Threats had there been even a rumor of this: the Perversion not whole? "If
this is true, then the Straumers may have a chance. It all depends on the
missing parts of the design document."
"Just so. And of course the humans realized this too. They planned to
head straight for the Bottom of the Beyond, rendezvous there with their
accomplices from Straum."
Which -- considering the ultimate magnitude of the disaster -- would
never happen. Ravna leaned back, oblivious of Pham Nuwen for the first time
in many hours. Most likely both ships had been destroyed by now. If not --
well, the Straumers had been at least half-smart, heading for the Bottom. If
they had what Blueshell thought, the Perversion would be very interested in
finding them. It was no wonder Blueshell and Greenstalk hadn't announced
this on the news groups. "So you know where they were going to rendezvous?"
she said softly.
"Approximately."
Greenstalk burred something at him.
"Not in ourselves," he said. "The coordinates are in the safeness at
our ship. But there is more. The Straumers had a backup plan if the
rendezvous failed. They intended to signal Relay with their ship's
ultrawave."
"Now wait. Just how big is this ship?" Ravna was no physical-layer
engineer, but she knew that Relay's backbone transceivers were actually
swarms of antenna elements scattered across several light years, each
element ten-thousand kilometers across.
Blueshell rolled forward and back, a quick gesture of agitation. "We
don't know, but it's nothing exceptional. Unless you're looking precisely at
it with a large antenna, you'd never detect it from here."
Greenstalk added, "We think that was part of their plan, though it is
desperation on top of desperation. Since we came to Relay, we've been
talking to the Org -- "
"Discreetly! Quietly!" Blueshell put in abruptly.
"Yes. We've asked the Organization to listen for this ship. I'm afraid
we haven't talked to the right people. No one seems to put much credence in
us. After all, the story is ultimately from a Lesser Rider," Yeah. What
could they know that was under a hundred years old? "What we're asking would
normally be a great expense, and apparently prices are especially high right
now."
Ravna tried to curb her enthusiasm. If she had read this in a
newsgroup, it would've been just one more interesting rumor. Why should she
boggle just because she was getting it face-to-face? By the Powers, what
irony. Hundreds of customers from the Top and the Transcend -- even Old One
-- were saturating Relay's resources with their curiosity about the Straumli
debacle. What if the answer had been sitting in front of them, suppressed by
the very eagerness of their investigation? "Just who have you been talking
to? Never mind, never mind." Maybe she should just go to Grondr 'Kalir with
the story. "I think you should know that I am a -- " very minor! "--
employee of the Vrinimi Organization. I may be able to help."
She had expected some surprise at this sudden good luck. Instead there
was a pause. Apparently Blueshell had lost his place in the conversation.
Finally Greenstalk spoke. "I am blushing.... You see, we knew that.
Blueshell looked you up in the employees' directory; you are the only human
in the Org. You're not in Customer Contact, but we thought that if we
chanced upon you, so to speak, you might give us a kindly hearing."
Blueshell's tendrils rustled together sharply. Irritation? Or had he
finally caught up to the conversation? "Yes. Well, since we are all being so
frank, I suppose we should confess that this might even benefit us. If the
refugee ship can prove that the Perversion is not a full Class Two, then
perhaps we can convince our buyers that our cargo has not been compromised.
If they only knew, my certificant friends would be groveling at your feet,
my lady Ravna."
They stayed at The Wandering Company until well past midnight. Business
picked up at the circadian peak of some of the new arrivals. Floor and table
shows were raucous all around. Pham's eyes flickered this way and that,
taking it all in. But above all he seemed fascinated by Blueshell and
Greenstalk. The two were starkly nonhuman, in some ways even strange as
aliens go. Skroderiders were one of the very few races that had achieved
long- term stability in the Beyond. Speciation had long ago occurred,
varieties heading outward or becoming extinct. And still there were some who
matched their ancient skrodes, a unique balance of outlook and machine
interface that was more than a billion years old. But Blueshell and
Greenstalk were also traders with much of the outlook that Pham Nuwen had
known in the Slowness. And though Pham acted as ignorant as ever, there was
new diplomacy in him. Or maybe the awesomeness of the Beyond was finally
getting through his thick skull. He couldn't have asked for better drinking
buddies. As a race, the Skroderiders preferred lazy reminiscence to almost
any activity. Once delivered of their critical message, the two were quite
content to talk of their life in the Beyond, to explain things in whatever
detail the barbarian could wish. The razor-jawed certificants stayed well
lost.
Ravna got a mild buzz on, and watched the three talk shop. She smiled
to herself. In a way, she was the outsider now, the person who had never
done. Blueshell and Greenstalk had been all over, and some of their stories
sounded wild even to her. Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted,
actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters. Two
of these three might be mistaken for potted trees on hotcarts, and the third
was unlike any human in her life. Their fluency was in an artificial
language, and two of the "voices" were squawky raspings. Yet ... after a few
minutes' listening, their personalities seemed to float in her mind's eye,
more interesting than many of her school chums, but not that different. The
two Skroderiders were mates. She hadn't thought that could count for much;
among Riders, sex amounted to scarcely more than being next-door neighbors
at the right time of year. Yet there was deep affection here. Greenstalk
especially seemed a loving personality. She (he?) was shy yet stubborn, with
a kind of honesty that might be a major handicap in a trader. Blueshell made
up for that failing. He (she?) could be glib and talkative, quite capable of
maneuvering things his way. Underneath, Ravna glimpsed a compulsive
personality, uncomfortable with his own sneakiness, ultimately grateful when
Greenstalk reined him in.
And what of Pham Nuwen? Yes, what's the inner being you see there? In
an odd way, he was more of a mystery. The arrogant boob of this afternoon
seemed to be mostly invisible tonight. Maybe it had been a cover for
insecurity. The fellow had been born in a male-dominated culture, virtually
the opposite of the matriarchy that all Beyonder humanity descended from.
Underneath the arrogance, a very nice person might be living. Then there was
the way he had faced down razor-jaw. And the way he was drawing out the
Skroderiders. It occurred to Ravna that after a lifetime of reading romantic
fiction, she had run into her first hero.
It was after 02:30 when they left The Wandering Company. The sun would
be rising across the bow horizon in less than five hours. The two
Skroderiders came outside to see them off. Blueshell had switched back to
Samnorsk to regale Ravna with a story of his last visit to Sjandra Kei --
and remind her to ask about the refugee ship.
The Skroderiders dwindled beneath them as Ravna and Pham rose into the
thinning air and headed toward the residential towers.
The two humans didn't say anything for a couple of minutes. It was even
possible that Pham Nuwen was impressed by the view. They were passing over
gaps in the brightly lit Docks, places where they could see through the
parks and concourses to the surface of Groundside a thousand kilometers
below. The clouds there were whorls of dark on dark.
Ravna's residence was at the outer edge of the Docks. Here the air
fountains were of no use; her apartment tower rose into frank vacuum. They
glided down to her balcony, trading their suits' atmosphere for the
apartment's. Ravna's mouth was leading a life of its own, explaining how the
residence was what she'd been assigned when she worked at the archive, that
it is was nothing compared to her new office. Pham Nuwen nodded,
quiet-faced. There were none of the smart remarks of their earlier tours.
She babbled on, and then they were inside and.... She shut up, and they
just looked at each other. In a way, she'd wanted this clown ever since
Grondr's silly animation. But it wasn't till this evening at The Wandering
Company that she'd felt right about bringing him home with her. "Well, I, uh
..." So. Ravna, the ravening princess. Where is your glib tongue now?
She settled for reaching out, putting her hand on his. Pham Nuwen
smiled back, shy too, by the Powers! "I think you have a nice place," he
said.
"I've decorated it Techno-Primitive. Being stuck at the edge of the
Docks has its points: The natural view isn't messed up by city lights. Here,
I'll show you." She doused the lights and pulled the curtains aside. The
window was a natural transparency, looking out from the edge of the Docks.
The view tonight should be terrific. On the ride from The Company, the sky
had been awfully dark. The in-system factories must be off line or hidden
behind Groundside. Even ship traffic seemed sparse.
She went back to stand by Pham. The window was a vague rectangle across
her vision. "You have to wait a minute for your eyes to adjust. There's no
amplification at all." The curve of Groundside was clear now, clouds with
occasional pricks of light. She slipped her arm across his back, and after a
moment felt his across her shoulders.
She'd guessed right: tonight, the Galaxy owned the sky. It was a sight
that Vrinimi old hands happily ignored. For Ravna, it was the most beautiful
thing about Relay. Without enhancement, the light was faint. Twenty thousand
light-years is a long, long way. At first there was just a suggestion of
mist, and an occasional star. As her eyes adapted, the mist took shape,
curving arcs, some places brighter, some dimmer. A minute more and ... there
were knots in the mist ... there were streaks of utter black that separated
the curving arms ... complexity on complexity, twisting toward the pale hub
that was the Core. Maelstrom. Whirlpool. Frozen, still, across half the sky.
She heard Pham's breath catch in his throat. He said something,
sing-song syllables that could not have been Trisk, and certainly not
Samnorsk. "All my life I lived in a tiny clump of that. And I thought I was
a master of space. I never dreamed to stand and see the whole blessed thing
at once." His hand tightened on her shoulder, then gentled, stroking her
neck. "And no matter how long we watch, will we see any sign of the Zones?"
She shook her head slowly. "But they're easily imagined." She gestured
with her free hand. In the large, the Zones of Thought followed the mass
distribution of the Galaxy: The Mindless Depths extending down to the soft
glow of the galactic Core. Farther out, the Great Slowness, where humankind
had been born, where ultralight could not exist and civilizations lived and
died unknowing and unknown. And the Beyond, the stars about four-fifths out
from the center, extending well off-plane to include places like Relay. The
Known Net had existed in some form for billions of years in the Beyond. It
was not a civilization; few civilizations lasted longer than a million
years. But the records of the past were quite complete. Sometimes they were
intelligible. More often, reading them involved translations of translations
of translations, passed down from one defunct race to another with no one to
corroborate -- worse than any multihop net message could ever be. Yet some
things were quite clear: There had always been the Zones of Thought, though
perhaps they were slightly inward-moved now. There had always been wars and
peace, and races upwelling from the Great Slowness, and thousands of little
empires. There had always been races moving into the Transcend, to become
the Powers ... or their prey.
"And the Transcend?" Pham said. "Is that just the far dark?" The dark
between the galaxies.
Ravna laughed softly. "It includes all that but ... see the outer
reaches of the spirals. They're in the Transcend." Most everything farther
than forty thousand light-years from the galactic center was.
Pham Nuwen was silent for a long moment. She felt a tiny shiver pass
through him. "After talking to the wheelies, I -- I think I understand more
of what you were warning me about. There's a lot of things I don't know,
things that could kill me ... or worse."
Common sense triumphs at last. "True," she said quietly. "But it's not
just you, or the brief time you've been here. You could study your whole
life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human
motivation? It's not a good analogy, but it's the only safe one; we are like
dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different
things people do to animals -- ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal --
each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural
protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not
exist." She waved at the misty star swarms. "The Beyond and below are like a
deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far
down that the beings on the surface -- superior though they are -- can't
effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper
levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a
relatively safe place." She paused. There was more to the analogy. "And just
as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There
are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient
factories -- but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of
those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices.
Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can't
make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor."
Pham turned toward her, away from window and the stars. "So there are
always 'fish' edging close to the surface." For an instant she thought she
had lost him, that he was caught by the romance of the Transcendent
deathwish. "Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood ... and
not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it." She felt him shiver
and then his arms were around her. She tilted her head up and found his lips
waiting.
It had been two years since Ravna Bergsndot left Sjandra Kei. In some
ways the time had gone fast. Just now her body was telling her what a long,
long time it had really been. Every touch was so vivid, waking desires
carefully suppressed. Suddenly her skin was tingling all over. It took
marvelous restraint to undress without tearing anything.
Ravna was out of practice. And of course she had nothing recent to
compare to.... But Pham Nuwen was very, very good.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay01 at Relay
Language path: Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK:Relay units
From: Net Administrator for Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down
Subject: Complaints about Relay, a suggestion
Summary: It's getting worse; try us instead
Key phrases: communications problems, Relay unreliability, Transcend
Distribution:
Communication Costs Special Interest Group, Motley Hatch Administration Group, Transceiver Relay01 at Relay, Transceiver Not-for-Long at Shortstop,
Follow-ups to: Windsong Expansion Interest Group
Date: 07:21:21 Docks Time, 36/09 of Org year 52089
Text of message:
During the last five hundred hours, Comm Costs shows 9,834
transceiver-layer congestion complaints against the Vrinimi operation at
Relay. Each of these complaints involves services to tens of thousand of
planets. Vrinimi has promised again and again that the congestion is a
purely temporary increase of Transcendent usage.
As Relay's chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have
benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we thought it
inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the problem.
The events of the last seven hours compel us to change this policy.
Those reading this item already know about the incident; most of you are the
victims of it. Beginning at [00:00:27 Docks Time], Vrinimi Org began taking
transceivers off-line, an unscheduled outage. R01 went out at 00:00:27, R02
at 02:50:32, R03 and R04 at 03:12:01. Vrinimi stated that a Transcendent
customer was urgently requesting bandwidth. (R00 had been previously
dedicated to that Power's use.) The customer required use of both up- and
down-link bandwidth. By the Org's own admission, the unscheduled usage
exceeded sixty percent of their entire capacity. Note that the excesses of
the preceding five hundred hours -- excesses which caused entirely justified
complaint -- were never more than five percent of Org capacity.
Friends, we of Windsong are in the long-haul communication business. We
know how difficult it is to maintain transceiver elements that mass as much
as a planet. We know that hard contract commitments simply cannot be made by
suppliers in our line of work. But at the same time, the behavior of Vrinimi
Org is unacceptable. It's true that in the last three hours the Org has
returned R01 through R04 to general service, and promised to pass on the
Power's surpayment to all those who were "inconvenienced". But only Vrinimi
knows how large these surpayments really are. And no one (not even Vrinimi!)
knows whether this is the end of the outages.
What is to Vrinimi a sudden, incredible cash glut, is to the rest of
you an unaccountable disaster.
Therefore Windsong at Debley Down is considering a major -- and
permanent -- expansion of our service: the construction of five additional
backbone transceivers. Obviously this will be immensely expensive.
Transceivers are never cheap, and Debley Down does not have quite the
geometry enjoyed by Relay. We expect the cost must be amortized over many
decades of good business. We can't undertake it without clear customer
commitment. In order to determine this demand, and to ensure that we build
what is really needed, we are creating a temporary newsgroup, Windsong
Expansion Interest Group, moderated and archived at Windsong. Send/Receive
charges to transceiver-layer customers on this group will be only ten
percent our usual. We urge you, our transceiver-layer customers, to use this
service to talk to each other, to decide what you can safely expect from
Vrinimi Org in the future and how you feel about our proposals.
We are waiting to hear from you.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
CHAPTER 9
Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when
she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously
insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened
her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly
around ... a large pillow. Damn. He'd already left. She lay back for a
second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last
night she hadn't realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense
... what a strange thing.
The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked
unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive
nonsense. "Yes?"
It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? "I'm sorry to bother you, Ravna, but
-- are you all right?" The Rider interrupted herself.
Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange:
sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She
rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. "Yes, I'm fine."
Fine! "What's up?"
"We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were
so highly placed. We'd been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org
to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we
were told the survey is being undertaken immediately."
"Um." Say what? "That's wonderful, but I'm not sure I -- who's paying
for it, anyway?"
"I don't know, but it is expensive. We were told they're dedicating a
backbone transceiver to the search. If there's anyone transmitting, we
should know in a matter of hours."
They chatted for a few more minutes, Ravna gradually becoming more
coherent as she parceled the various aspects of the last ten hours into
business and pleasure. She had half expected the Org to bug her at The
Wandering Company. Maybe Grondr just heard the story there -- and gave it
full credit. But just yesterday, he'd been wimping about transceiver
saturation. Either way, this was good news -- perhaps extraordinarily good.
If the Riders' wild story were true, the Straumli Perversion might be less
than Transcendent. And if the refugee ships had some clues on how to bring
it down, Straumli Realm might even be saved.
After Greenstalk rang off, Ravna wandered about the apartment, getting
herself in shape, playing the various possibilities against each other. Her
actions became more purposeful, almost up to their usual speed. There were a
lot of things she wanted to check into.
Then the phone was ringing again. This time she previewed the caller.
Oops! It was Grondr Vrinimikalir. She combed her hand back through her hair;
it still looked like crap, and this phone was not up to deception. Suddenly
she noticed that Grondr didn't look so hot either. His facial chitin was
smudged, even across some of his freckles. She accepted the call.
"Ah!" His voice actually squeaked, then returned to its normal level.
"Thank you for answering. I would have called earlier, except things have
been very ... chaotic." Just where had his cool distance gone? "I just want
you to know that the Org had nothing to do with this. We were totally taken
in until just a couple of hours ago." He launched into a disjointed
description of massive demand swamping the Org's resources.
As he rambled, Ravna punched up a summary of recent Relay business. By
the Powers that Be: Sixty percent diversion? Excerpts from Comm Costs: She
scanned quickly down the item from Windsong. The gasbags were as pompous as
ever, but their offer to replace Relay was probably for real. It was just
the sort of thing Grondr had been afraid might happen.
"-- Old One just kept asking for more and more. When we finally figured
things out, and confronted him.... Well, we came close to threatening
violence. We have the resources to destroy his emissary vessel. No telling
what his revenge might be, but we told Old One his demands were already
destroying us. Thank the Powers, he just seemed amused; he backed off. He's
restricted to a single transceiver now, and that's on a signal search that
has nothing to do with us."
Hmm. One mystery solved. Old One must have been snooping around The
Wandering Company and overheard the Skroderiders' story. "Maybe things will
be okay, then. But it's important to be just as tough if Old One tries to
abuse us again." The words were already out of her mouth before she
considered who she was giving advice to.
Grondr didn't seem to notice. If anything, he was the one scrambling to
agree: "Yes, yes. I'll tell you, if Old One were any ordinary customer, we'd
blacklist him forever for this deception.... But then if he were ordinary,
he could never have fooled us."
Grondr wiped pudgy white fingers across his face. "No mere Beyonder
could have altered our record of the dredge expedition. Not even one from
the Top could have broken into the junkyard and manipulated the remains
without our even suspecting."
Dredge? Remains? Ravna began to see that she and Grondr were not
talking about the same thing. "Just what did Old One do?"
"The details? We're pretty sure of them now. Since the Fall of Straum,
Old One has been very interested in humans. Unfortunately, there were no
willing ones available here. It began manipulating us, rewriting our
junkyard records. We've recovered a clean backup from a branch office: The
dredge really did encounter the wreck of a human ship; there were human body
parts in it -- but nothing that we could have revived. Old One must have
mixed and matched what it found there. Perhaps it fabricated memories by
extrapolating from human cultural data in the archives. With hindsight, we
can match its early requests with the invasion of our junkyard."
Grondr rattled on, but Ravna wasn't listening. Her eyes stared blindly
through the phone's display. We are little fish in the abyss, protected by
the deep from the fishers above. But even if they can't live down here, the
clever fisherfolk still have their lures and deadly tricks. And so Pham --
"Pham Nuwen is just a robot, then," she said softly.
"Not precisely. He is human, and with his fake memories he can operate
autonomously. But when Old One buys full bandwidth, the creature is fully an
emissary device." The hand and eye of a Power.
Grondr's mouthparts clattered in abject embarrassment. "Ravna, we don't
know all that happened last night; there was no reason to have you under
close surveillance. But Old One assures us that its need for direct
investigation is over. In any case, we'll never give him the bandwidth to
try again."
Ravna barely nodded. Her face suddenly felt cold. She had never felt
such anger and such fright at the same time. She stood in a wave of
dizziness and walked away from the phone, ignoring Grondr's worried cries.
The stories from grad school came tumbling through her mind, and the myths
of a dozen human religions. Consequences, consequences. Some of them she
could defend against; others were past repair.
And from somewhere in the back of her mind, an incredibly silly thought
crawled out from under the horror and the rage. For eight hours she had been
face to face with a Power. It was the sort of experience that made a chapter
in textbooks, the sort of thing that was always far away and misreported.
And it was the sort of thing no one in all of Sjandra Kei could come near to
claiming. Until now.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
CHAPTER 10
Johanna was in the boat for a long time. The sun never set, though now
it was low behind her, now it was high in front, now all was cloudy and rain
plinked off the tarp covering her blankets. She spent the hours in an
agonized haze. Things happened that could only have been dreams. There were
creatures pulling at her clothes, blood sticking everywhere. Gentle hands
and rat snouts dressed her wounds, and forced chill water down her throat.
When she thrashed around, Mom rearranged her blankets and comforted her with
the strangest sounds. For hours, someone warm lay beside her. Sometimes it
was Jefri; more often it was a large dog, a dog that purred.
The rain passed. The sun was on the left side of the boat, but hidden
behind a cold, snapping shadow. More and more, the pain became divisible.
Part of it was in her chest and shoulder; that stabbed through her whenever
the boat wobbled. Part of it was in her gut, an emptiness that was not quite
nausea ... she was so hungry, so thirsty.
More and more, she was remembering, not dreaming. There were nightmares
that would never go away. They had really happened. They were happening now.
The sun peeked in and out of the tumble of clouds. It slid slowly lower
across the sky till it was almost behind the boat. She tried to remember
what Daddy had been saying just before ... everything went bad. They were in
this planet's arctic, in the summer. So the sun's low point must be north,
and their twin-hulled boat was sailing roughly southwards. Wherever they
were going, it was minute by minute farther from the spacecraft and any hope
of finding Jefri.
Sometimes the water was like open sea, the hills distant or hidden by
low clouds. Sometimes they passed through narrows, and swept close to walls
of naked rock. She'd had no idea a sailboat could move so fast or be so
dangerous. Four of the rat creatures worked desperately to keep them off the
rocks. They bounded nimbly from mast platform to railing, sometimes standing
on each other's shoulders to extend their reach. The twin-hulled boat tilted
and groaned in water that was suddenly rough. Then they'd be through and the
hills would be at a peaceful distance, sliding slowly past.
For a long while, she pretended delirium. She moaned, she twisted. She
watched. The boat hulls were long and narrow, almost like canoes. The sail
was mounted between them. The shadow in her dreams had been that sail,
snapping in the cold, clean wind. The sky was an avalanche of grays, light
and dark. There were birds up there. They dipped past the mast, circled
again and again. There was twittering and hissing all around her. But the
sound did not come from the birds.
It was the monsters. She watched them through lowered lashes. These
were the same kind that killed Mom and Dad. They even wore the same funny
clothes, gray-green jackets studded with stirrups and pockets. Dogs or
wolves she had thought before. That didn't really describe them. Sure, they
had four slender legs and pointy little ears. But with their long ne