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"Yes, yes, but remember. The Sjandra Kei worlds are mainly human, your
home, my lady Ravna. And Blueshell and I know them well; after all, they
were the source of the crypto shipment we brought to Relay. We have friends
there and you a family. Even Blueshell agrees that we can get the work done
without notice there."
"Yes, if we could get there." Blueshell's voder voice sounded petulant.
"Okay, what are the other choices?"
"They are not so well-known. I'll make a list." Her fronds drifted
across a console. "Our last chance for choice is rather near our planned
course. It's a single system civilization. The Net name is ... it translates
as Harmonious Repose."
"Rest in Peace, eh?" said Pham.
But they had agreed to voyage on quietly, always watching the bad drive
spines, postponing the decision to stop for help.
The days became weeks, and weeks slowly counted into months. Four
voyagers on a quest toward the Bottom. The drive became worse, but slowly,
right on OOB's diagnostic projections.
The Blight continued to spread across the Top of the Beyond, and its
attacks on Network archives extended far beyond its direct reach.
Communication with Jefri was improving. Messages trickled in at the
rate of one or two a day. Sometimes, when OOB's antenna swarm was tuned just
right, he and Ravna would talk almost in real time. Progress was being made
on the Tines' world, faster than she had expected -- perhaps fast enough
that the boy could save himself.
It should have been a hard time, locked up in the single ship with just
three others, with only a thread of communication to the outside, and that
with a lost child.
In any case, it was rarely boring. Ravna found that each of them had
plenty to do. For herself it was managing the ship's library, coaxing out of
it the plans that would help Mr. Steel and Jefri. OOB's library was nothing
compared to the Archive at Relay, or even the university libraries at
Sjandra Kei, but without proper search automation it could be just as
unknowable. And as their voyage proceeded, that automation need more and
more special care.
And ... things could never be boring with Pham around. He had a dozen
projects, and curiosity about everything. "Voyaging time can be a gift,"
he'd say. "Now we have time to catch ourselves up, time to get ready for
whatever we find ahead." He was learning Samnorsk. It went slower than his
faked learning on Relay, but the guy had a natural bent for languages, and
Ravna gave him plenty of practice.
He spent several hours each day in the OOB's workshop, often with
Blueshell. Reality graphics were a new thing to him, but after a few weeks
he was beyond toy prototypes. The pressure suits he built had power packs
and weapons stores. "We don't know what things may be like when we arrive;
powered armor could be real useful."
At the end of each work day they would all meet on the command deck, to
compare notes, to consider the latest from Jefri and Mr. Steel, to review
the drive status. For Ravna this could be the happiest time of the day ...
and sometimes the hardest. Pham had rigged the display automation to show
castle walls all around. A huge fireplace replaced the normal window on comm
status. The sound of it was almost perfect; he had even coaxed a small
amount of "fire" heat from that wall. This was a castle hall out of Pham's
memory, from Canberra he said. But it wasn't that different from the Age of
Princesses on Nyjora (though most of those castles had been in tropical
swamps, where big fireplaces were rarely used). For some perverse reason,
even the Riders seemed to enjoy it; Greenstalk said it reminded her of a
trading stop from her first years with Blueshell. Like travelers who have
walked through a long day, the four of them rested in the coziness of a
phantom lodge. And when the new business was settled, Pham and the Riders
would trade stories, often late into the "night".
Ravna sat beside him, the least talkative of the four. She joined in
the laughter and sometimes the discussion: There was the time Blueshell had
a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption, and Ravna knew some
stories of her own to illustrate the Rider's opinion. But this was also the
hardest time for her. Yes, the stories were wonderful. Blueshell and
Greenstalk had been so many places, and at heart they were traders. Swindles
and bargains and good done were all part of their lives. Pham listened to
his friends, almost enraptured ... and then told his own stories, of being a
prince on Canberra, of being a Slow Zone trader and explorer. And for all
the limitations of the Slowness, his life's adventures surpassed even the
Skroderiders'. Ravna smiled and tried to pretend enthusiasm.
For Pham's stories were too much. He honestly believed them, but she
couldn't imagine one human seeing so much, doing so much. Back on Relay, she
had claimed his memories were synthetic, a little joke of Old One. She had
been very angry when she said it, and more than anything she wished she
never had ... because it was so clearly the truth. Greenstalk and Blueshell
never noticed, but sometimes in the middle of a story Pham would stumble on
his memories and a look of barely concealed panic would come to his eyes.
Somewhere inside, he knew the truth too, and she suddenly wanted to hug him,
comfort him. It was like having a terribly wounded friend, with whom you can
talk but never mutually admit the scope of the injuries. Instead she
pretended the lapses didn't exist, smiling and laughing at the rest of his
story.
And Old One's jape was all so unnecessary. Pham didn't have to be a
great hero. He was a decent person, though ebullient and kind of a
rule-breaker. He had every bit as much persistence as she, and more courage.
What craft Old One must have had to make such a person, what ... Power.
And how she hated Him, for making a joke of such a person.
Of Pham's godshatter, there was scarcely a sign. For that Ravna was
very grateful. Once or twice a month he had a dreamy spell. For a day or two
after he would go nuts with some new project, often something he couldn't
clearly explain. But it wasn't getting worse; he wasn't drifting away from
her.
"And the godshatter may save us in the end," he would say when she had
the courage to ask him about it. "No, I don't know how." He tapped his
forehead. "It's still god's own crowded attic up here. "It's more than
memory. Sometimes it needs all my mind to think with and there's no room
left for self-awareness, and afterwards I can't explain, but... sometimes I
have a glimmer. Whatever Jefri's parents brought to the Tines' world: it can
hurt the Blight. Call it an antidote -- better yet, a countermeasure.
Something taken from the Perversion as it was aborning in the Straumli lab.
Something the Perversion didn't even suspect was gone until much later."
Ravna sighed. It was hard to imagine good news that was also so
frightening. "The Straumers could sneak something like that right out from
the Perversion's heart?"
"Maybe. Or maybe, Countermeasure used the Straumers to escape the
Perversion. To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the
plan might work, Rav, at least if I -- if Old One's godshatter -- can get
down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of
the Beyond upside down -- hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least
of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it's looking in all
the wrong places. We'll have our chance at Countermeasure."
She thought of Jefri's messages. "The rot on the walls of Jefri's ship.
You think that's what it is?"
Pham's eyes went vague. "Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says
it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He
seems a little disgusted by it.... That's good, probably keeps his Tinish
friends away from it."
A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham's mind too.
And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would
stand before that unknown and Old One's dead hand would act ... through
Pham. Ravna shivered, and didn't say anything more for a time.
Month by month, the gunpowder project stayed right on the schedule of
the library's development program. The Tines had been able to make the stuff
easily; there had been very little backtracking through the development
tree. Alloy testing had been the critical event that slowed things, but they
were over the hump there too. The packs of "Hidden Island" had built the
first three prototypes: breech-loading cannon that were small enough to be
carried by a single pack. Jefri guessed they could begin mass production in
another ten days.
The radio project was the weird one. In one sense it was behind
schedule; in another, it had become something more than Ravna had ever
imagined. After a long period of normal progress, Jefri had come back with a
counterplan. It consisted of a complete reworking of the tables for the
acoustic interface.
"I thought these jokers were first-time medievals," Pham Nuwen said
when he saw Jefri's message.
"That's right. And in principle, they just reasoned out consequences to
what we sent them. The want to support pack-thought across the radio."
"Hunh. Yes. We described how the tables specified the transducer grid
-- all in nontechnical Samnorsk. That included showing how small table
changes would make the grid different. But look, our design would give them
a three kilohertz band -- a nice, voice-grade connection. You're telling me
that implementing this new table would give'em two hundred kilohertz."
"Yes. That's what my dataset says."
He grinned his cocky smile. "Ha! And that's my point. Sure, in
principle we gave them enough information to do the mod. It looks to me like
making this expanded spec table is equivalent to solving a, hmm," he counted
rows and columns, "a five-hundred-node numerical PDE. And little Jefri
claims that all his datasets are destroyed, and that his ship computer is
not generally usable."
Ravna leaned back from the display. "Sorry. I see what you mean." You
get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget what it must be like
without them. "You ... you think this might be, uh, Countermeasure's doing?"
Pham Nuwen hesitated, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility.
Then, "No ... no, it's not that. I think this 'Mister Steel' is playing
games with our heads. All we have is a byte stream from 'Jefri'. What do we
really know about what's going on?"
"Well, I'll tell you some things I know. We are talking to a young
human child who was raised in Straumli Realm. You've been reading most of
his messages in Trisk translation. That loses a lot of the colloquialisms
and the little errors of a child who is a native speaker of Samnorsk. The
only way this might be faked is by a group of human adults.... And after
twenty plus weeks of knowing Jefri, I'll tell you even that is unlikely."
"Okay. So suppose Jefri is for real. We have this eight-year-old kid
down on the Tines' world. He's telling us what he considers to be the truth.
I'm saying it looks like someone is lying to him. Maybe we can trust what he
sees with his own eyes. He says these creatures aren't sapient except in
groups of five or so. Okay. We'll believe that." Pham rolled his eyes.
Apparently his reading had shown how rare group intelligences were this side
of the Transcend. "The kid says they didn't see anything but small towns
from space, and that everything on the ground is medieval. Okay, we'll buy
that. But. What are the chances that this race is smart enough to do PDE's
in their heads, and do them from just the implications in your message?"
"Well, there have been some humans that smart." She could name one case
in Nyjoran history, another couple from Old Earth. If such abilities were
common among the packs, they were smarter than any natural race she had
heard of. "So this isn't first-time medievalism?"
"Right. I bet this is some colony fallen on hard times -- like your
Nyjora and my Canberra, except that they have the good luck of being in the
Beyond. These dog packs have a working computer somewhere. Maybe it's under
control of their priest class; maybe they don't have much else. But they're
holding out on us."
"But why? We'd be helping them in any case. And Jefri has told us how
this group saved him."
Pham started to smile again, the old supercilious smile. Then he
sobered. He was really trying to break that habit. "You've been on a dozen
different worlds, Ravna. And I know you've read about thousands more, at
least in survey. You probably know of varieties of medievalism I've never
guessed. But remember, I've actually been there.... I think." The last was a
nervous mutter.
"I've read about the Age of Princesses," Ravna said mildly.
"Yes.... and I'm sorry for belittling that. In any medieval politics,
the blade and the thought are closely connected. But they become much more
closely bound for someone who's lived through it. Look, even if we believe
everything that Jefri says he has seen, this Hidden Island Kingdom is a
sinister thing."
"You mean the names?"
"Like Flensers, Steel, Tines? Harsh names aren't necessarily
meaningful." Pham laughed. "I mean, when I was eight years old, one of my
titles was already 'Lord Master Disemboweler'." He saw the look on Ravna's
face and hurriedly added, "And at that age, I hadn't even witnessed more
than a couple of executions! No, the names are only a small part of it. I'm
thinking of the kid's description of the castle -- which seems to be close
by the ship -- and this ambush he thinks he was rescued from. It doesn't add
up. You asked 'what could they gain from betraying us'. I can see that
question from their point of view. If they are a fallen colony, they have a
clear idea what they've lost. They probably have some remnant technology,
and are paranoid as hell. If I were them, I'd seriously consider ambushing
the rescuers if those rescuers seemed weak or careless. And even if we come
on strong ... look at the questions Jefri asks for Steel. The guy is
fishing, trying to figure out what we really value: the refugee ship, Jefri
and the coldsleepers, or something on the ship. By the time we arrive, Steel
will probably have wiped the local opposition -- thanks to us. My guess is
we're in for some heavy blackmail when we get to Tines' world."
I thought we were talking about the good news. Ravna paged back through
recent messages. Pham was right. The boy was telling the truth as he knew
it, but.... "I don't see how we can play things any differently. If we don't
help Steel against the Woodcarvers -- "
"Yeah. We don't know enough to do much else. Whatever else is true, the
Woodcarvers seem a valid threat to Jefri and the ship. I'm just saying we
should be thinking about all the possibilities. One thing we absolutely
mustn't do is show interest in Countermeasure. If the locals know how
desperate we are for that, we don't have a chance.
"And it may be time to start planting a few lies of our own. Steel's
been talking about building a landing place for us -- within his castle.
There's no way OOB could fit, but I think we should play along, tell Jefri
that we can separate from our ultradrive, something like his container ship.
Let Steel concentrate on building harmless traps...."
He hummed one of his strange little "marching" tunes. "About the radio
thing: why don't we compliment the Tines real casually for improving our
design. I wonder what they'd say?"
Pham Nuwen got his answer less than three days later. Jefri Olsndot
said that he had done the optimization. So if you believed the kid, there
was no evidence for hidden computers. Pham was not at all convinced: "So
just by coincidence, we have Isaac Newton on the other end of the line?"
Ravna didn't argue the point. It was an enormous bit of luck, yet.... She
went over the earlier messages. In language and general knowledge, the boy
seemed very ordinary for his age. But occasionally there were situations
involving mathematical insight -- not formal, taught math -- where Jefri
said striking things. Some of those conversations had been under fine
conditions, with turnaround times of less than a minute. It all seemed too
consistent to be the lie Pham Nuwen thought.
Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.
There was always something: problems with the Tines' developments,
fears that the murderous Woodcarvers might attack Mr. Steel, worries about
the steadily degrading drive spines and Zone turbulence that slowed OOB's
progress even further. Life was by turns and at once frustrating, boring,
frightening. And yet ...
One night about four months into the flight, Ravna woke in the cabin
she had come to share with Pham. Maybe she had been dreaming, but she
couldn't remember anything except that it had been no nightmare. There was
no special noise in the room, nothing to wake her. Beside her, Pham was
sleeping soundly in their hammock net. She eased her arm down his back,
drawing him gently toward her. His breathing changed; he mumbled something
placid and unintelligible. In Ravna's opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the
experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone
... that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring
and effortless.
Ravna looked around the dimly-lit cabin, trying to imagine what had
woken her. Maybe it had just been the problems of the day -- Powers knew
there had been enough of those. She nestled her face against Pham's
shoulder. Yes, always problems, but ... in a way she more content than she
had been in years. Sure there were problems. Poor Jefri's situation. All the
people lost at Straum and Relay. But she had three friends, and a love.
Alone in a tiny ship bound for the Bottom, she was less lonely than she'd
been since leaving Sjandra Kei. More than ever in her life, maybe she could
do something to help with the problems.
And then she guessed, part in sadness, part in joy, that years from now
she might look back on these months as goldenly happy.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
And finally, almost five months out, it was clear there was no hope of
going on without repairing the drive spines. The OOB was suddenly doing only
a quarter of a light-year per hour in a volume that tested good for two. And
things were getting worse. They would have no trouble making it to
Harmonious Repose, but beyond that ...
Harmonious Repose. An ugly name, thought Ravna. Pham's "light-hearted"
translation was worse: Rest In Peace. In the Beyond, almost everything
habitable was in use. Civilizations were transient and races faded ... but
there were always new people moving up from Below. The result was most often
patchwork, polyspecific systems. Young races just up from the Slowness lived
uneasily with the remnants of older peoples. According to the ship's
library, RIP had been in the Beyond for a long time. It had been
continuously inhabited for at least two hundred million years, time for ten
thousand species to call it home. The most recent notes showed better than
one hundred racial terranes. Even the youngest was the residue of a dozen
emigrations. The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.
So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were
flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they'd be able to listen to the
News the whole way in.
Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external
goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious,
hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the
creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from
just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users.
Too bad we can't follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in
Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible
methods of payment.
Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Call to action
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay
Key phrases: Action, not talk
Text of message:
Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the
Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment
we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will
need support services including free Net time.
In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports
our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the
human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of
victory -- or wait, and be destroyed.
Death to vermin.
There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about
who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There
were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the
fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups.
Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still
making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that
way.
Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers
generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than
conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a
single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they
do after all?"
Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are
hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have
taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began.... By the Powers,
I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since
she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something
from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than
she realized. Now....
On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been
working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear
for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving
force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them
would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded
there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or
bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."
Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would
stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a
ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei
would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for
nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one
thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to
look like anything human."
And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of
Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders
went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances
that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded?
Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things
human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if
necessary.
Pham Nuwen checked what they did -- and found more than one slip-up.
For a barbarian programmer, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly
reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more
sophisticated than what he had known.
Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB
was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based
on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed
of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe
built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it.
RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check
and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to
match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and
"Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta
be honest, right?")
Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers
from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was
spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even
though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was
surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet.
The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural
view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet.
Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides,
hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects --
structures? -- sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast
needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed
more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt,
and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring
system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or
on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred
kilometers across ... but there appeared to be thousands of them.
At "Saint Rihndell's" direction they brought the ship down to the ring
plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big
impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. "Just like old, old
times," Pham Nuwen said.
In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it
looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were
objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of
icy froth -- gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly
motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In
the plane of the rings, they couldn't see more than a few hundred meters.
The debris blocked further views. And it wasn't all loose. Greenstalk
pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by
them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. "Looks like a single
structure," she said.
Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the
"frothy snowballs" sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks
long.... The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it
was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of
snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with
images from their approach, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better
than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered
along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure
could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart
briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was
vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time
Nyjoran railway.
Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc.
The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the
modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled
heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers,
they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths
were occupied.
Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell's business specs. "Hmm. Hm.
Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy." He angled some fronds back at the
ships in the exterior view.
Pham: "Maybe he's running a junkyard."
Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for
their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred
years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the
two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with "Saint
Rihndell".
"Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would
remember the type even if I'd never ridden a Skrode. But our business here
is not like anything we've done before."
Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his
cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic
stuff that protected what it covered.
This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring
systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly,
there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the
repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business
sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across
his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the
cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it
came to renting bandwidth -- or maybe it was simply cautious.
Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He
was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was
encrypted.
"Yes."
The Skroderiders passed through OOB's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc
habitat.
From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows
that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's
current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view,
but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat
swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central
fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of
a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow
surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like
food in a slow tidal surge.
The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body
plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The
tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment,
one such drifted out from the wall near the OOB's lock. It buzzed something
that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs
moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled
behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk,
"The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider
humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs -- evolved
from flippers or jaws or whatever -- were all very good for movement on
land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.
The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying
slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell
kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch
that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going?
What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at
Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term
memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.
Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to
understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller.... helper
creatures those are.... allies of big new customer..." Their guide's limited
speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more
than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of
Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in
Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or
Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important
questions: What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I
persuade you to part with it? Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out
the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and
ability.
It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell
chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's
recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of
others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could
work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And
this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above
would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore
articulated pressure suits -- the force-field suits of the High Beyond would
last only a few weeks down here.
They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks
circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of
meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there
was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane
beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a
thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had
seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed
against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on
their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration ... but she
doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be
clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.
Greenstalk had visited eight ring system civilizations in her life.
They were a common consequence of accidents and wars (and occasionally, of
deliberate habitat design). According to OOB's library, Harmonious Repose
had been a normal planetary system up till ten million years ago. Then
there'd been a real estate dispute: A young race from Below had thought to
colonize and exterminate the moribund inhabitants. The attack had been a
miscalculation, for the moribund could still kill and the system was reduced
to rubble. Perhaps the young race survived. But after ten million years, if
there were any of those young killers left they would now be the most frail
of the systems' elder races. Perhaps a thousand new races had passed through
in that time, and almost every one had done something to tailor the rings
and the gas cloud left from the debacle. What was left was not a ruin at
all, but old ... old. The ship's library claimed that no race had
transcended from Harmonious Repose in a thousand years. That fact was more
important than all the others. The current civilizations were in their
twilight, refining mediocrity. More than anything else, the system had the
feel of an old and beautiful tide pool, groomed and tended, shielded from
the exciting waves that might upset its bansai plumes. Most likely the
tusk-legs were the liveliest species about, perhaps the only one interested
in trade with the outside.
Their car slowed and spiraled into a small tower.
"By the Fleet, what I wouldn't give to be out there with them!" Pham
Nuwen waved at the views coming in from the skrode cameras. Ever since the
Riders left, he'd been at the windows, alternately gaping wide-eyed at the
ringscape and bouncing abstractedly between the command deck's floor and
ceiling. Ravna had never seen him so absorbed, so intense. However
fraudulent his memories of trading days, he truly thought he could make a
difference. And he may be right.
Pham came down from the ceiling, pulled close to the screen. It looked
like serious bargaining was about to begin. The Skroderiders had arrived in
a spherical room perhaps fifty meters across. Apparently they were floating
near the center of it. A forest grew inward from all directions, and the
Riders seemed to float just a few meters from the tree tops. Here and there
between the branches, they could see the ground, a mosaic of flowers.
Saint Rihndell's sales creatures were scattered all about the tallest
trees. They sat(?) with their ivory limbs twined about the tree tops.
Tusk-leg races were a common thing in the galaxy, but these were the first
Ravna had known. The body plan was totally unlike anything from home, and
even now she didn't have a clear idea of their appearance. Sitting in the
trees, their legs had more of the aspect of a skeletal fingers grasping
around the trunk. Their chief rep -- who claimed to be Saint Rihndell itself
-- had scrimshaw covering two-thirds of its ivory. Two of the windows showed
the carving close up; Pham seemed to think that understanding the artwork
might be useful.
Progress was slow. Triskweline was the common language, but good
interpreting devices didn't work this deep in the Beyond, and Saint
Rihndell's folk were only marginally familiar with the trade talk. Ravna was
used to clean translations. Even the Net messages she dealt with were
usually intelligible (though sometimes misleadingly so).
They'd been talking for twenty minutes and had only just established
that Saint Rihndell might have the ability to repair OOB. It was the usual
Riderly driftiness, and something more. The tedium seemed to please Pham
Nuwen, "Rav, this is almost like a Qeng Ho operation, face to face with
critters and scarcely a common language."
"We sent them a description of our repair problem hours ago. Why should
it take so long for a simple yes or no?"
"Because they're haggling," said Pham, his grin broadening. "'Honest'
Saint Rihndell here -- " he waved at the scrimshawed local, "-- wants to
convince us just how hard the job is.... Lord I wish I was out there."
Even Blueshell and Greenstalk seemed a little strange now. Their
Triskweline was stripped down, barely more complex than Saint Rihndell's.
And much of the discussion seemed very round about. Working for Vrinimi,
Ravna had had some experience with sales and trading. But haggling? You had
your pricing data bases and strategy support, and directions from Grondr's
people. You either had a deal or you didn't. What was going on between the
Riders and Saint Rihndell was one of the more alien things Ravna had ever
seen.
"Actually, things are going pretty well ... I think. You saw when we
arrived, the bone legs took away Blueshell's samples. By now they know
precisely what we have. There's something in those samples that they want.
"Yeah?"
"Sure. Saint Rihndell isn't bad-mouthing our stuff for his health."
"Damn it, it's possible we don't have anything on board they could
want. This was never intended to be a trade expedition." Blueshell and
Greenstalk had scavenged "product samples" from the ship's supplies, things
that the OOB could survive without. These included sensoria and some Low
Beyond computer gear. Some of that would be a serious loss. But one way or
another, we need those repairs.
Pham chuckled. "No. There's something there Saint Rihndell wants.
Otherwise he wouldn't still be jawing.... And see how he keeps needling us
about his 'other customers' needs'? Saint Rihndell is a human kind of a
guy."
Something like human song came over the link to the Riders. Ravna
phased Greenstalk's cameras toward the sound. From the forest "floor" on the
far side of Blueshell, three new creatures had appeared.
"Why ... they're beautiful. Butterflies," said Ravna.
"Huh?"
"I mean they look like butterflies. You know? Um. Insects with large
colored wings."
Giant butterflies, actually. The newcomers had a generally humanoid
body plan. They were about 150 centimeters tall and covered with
soft-looking brown fur. Their wings sprouted from behind their shoulder
blades. At full spread they were almost two meters across, soft blues and
yellows, some more intricately patterned than others. Surely they were
artificial, or a gengineered affectation; they would have been useless for
flying about in any reasonable gravity. But here in zero-gee.... The three
floated at the entrance for just a moment, their huge, soft eyes looking up
at the Riders. Then they swept their wings in measured sweeps, and drifted
gracefully into the air above the forest. The entire effect was like
something out of a children's video. They had pert, button noses, like pet
jorakorns, and eyes as wide and bashful as any human animator ever drew.
Their voices sounded like youngsters singing.
Saint Rihndell and his buddies sidled around their tree tops. The
tallest visitor sang on, its wings gently flexing. After a moment, Ravna
realized it was speaking fluent Trisk with a front end adapted to the
creature's natural speech:
"Saint Rihndell, greetings! Our ships are ready for your repairs. We
have made fair payment, and we are in a great hurry. Your work must begin at
once!" Saint Rihndell's Trisk specialist translated the speech for his boss.
Ravna leaned across Pham's back. "So maybe our friendly repairman
really is overbooked," she said.
"... Yeah."
Saint Rihndell came back around his treetop. His little arms picked at
the green needles as he made a reply. "Honored Customers. You made offer of
payment, not fully accepted. What you ask is in short supply, difficult to
... do."
The cuddly butterfly made a squeaking noise that might have passed for
joyous laughter in a human child. The sense behind its singing was
different: "Times are changing, Rihndell creature! Your people must learn:
We will not be stymied. You know my fleet's sacred mission. We count every
passing hour against you. Think on the fleet you will face if your lack of
cooperation is ever known -- is ever even suspected." There was a sweep of
blue and yellow wings, and the butterfly turned. Its dark, bashful eyes
rested on the Riders. "And these potted plants, they are customers? Dismiss
them. Till we are gone, you have no other customers."
Ravna sucked in a breath. The three had no visible weapons, but she was
suddenly afraid for Blueshell and Greenstalk.
"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
According to the clock, it took less than half an hour for the
Skroderiders to make it back. It seemed a lot longer to Pham Nuwen, even
though he tried to keep up a casual front with Ravna. Maybe they were both
keeping up a front; he knew she still considered him a fragile case.
But the Riders' cameras showed no more signs of the killer butterflies.
Finally the cargo lock cracked open and Blueshell and Greenstalk were back.
"I was sure the wily tusk-legs was just pretending there was strong
demand," said Blueshell. He seemed as eager to rehash the story as Pham was.
"Yeah, I thought so too. In fact, I still think those butterflies might
just be part of an act. It's all too melodramatic."
Blueshell's fronds rattled in a way that Pham recognized as a kind of
shiver. "I wager not, Sir Pham. Those were Aprahanti. Just the look of them
fills you with dread, does it not? They're rare these days, but a star
trader knows the stories. Still ... this is a little much even for
Aprahanti. Their Hegemony has been on the wane for several centuries." He
rattled something at the ship, and the windows were filled with views of
nearby berths in the repair harbor. There was more Rider rattling, this time
between Greenstalk and Blueshell. "Those other ships are a uniform type, you
know. A High Beyond design like ours, but more, um, ... militant."
home, my lady Ravna. And Blueshell and I know them well; after all, they
were the source of the crypto shipment we brought to Relay. We have friends
there and you a family. Even Blueshell agrees that we can get the work done
without notice there."
"Yes, if we could get there." Blueshell's voder voice sounded petulant.
"Okay, what are the other choices?"
"They are not so well-known. I'll make a list." Her fronds drifted
across a console. "Our last chance for choice is rather near our planned
course. It's a single system civilization. The Net name is ... it translates
as Harmonious Repose."
"Rest in Peace, eh?" said Pham.
But they had agreed to voyage on quietly, always watching the bad drive
spines, postponing the decision to stop for help.
The days became weeks, and weeks slowly counted into months. Four
voyagers on a quest toward the Bottom. The drive became worse, but slowly,
right on OOB's diagnostic projections.
The Blight continued to spread across the Top of the Beyond, and its
attacks on Network archives extended far beyond its direct reach.
Communication with Jefri was improving. Messages trickled in at the
rate of one or two a day. Sometimes, when OOB's antenna swarm was tuned just
right, he and Ravna would talk almost in real time. Progress was being made
on the Tines' world, faster than she had expected -- perhaps fast enough
that the boy could save himself.
It should have been a hard time, locked up in the single ship with just
three others, with only a thread of communication to the outside, and that
with a lost child.
In any case, it was rarely boring. Ravna found that each of them had
plenty to do. For herself it was managing the ship's library, coaxing out of
it the plans that would help Mr. Steel and Jefri. OOB's library was nothing
compared to the Archive at Relay, or even the university libraries at
Sjandra Kei, but without proper search automation it could be just as
unknowable. And as their voyage proceeded, that automation need more and
more special care.
And ... things could never be boring with Pham around. He had a dozen
projects, and curiosity about everything. "Voyaging time can be a gift,"
he'd say. "Now we have time to catch ourselves up, time to get ready for
whatever we find ahead." He was learning Samnorsk. It went slower than his
faked learning on Relay, but the guy had a natural bent for languages, and
Ravna gave him plenty of practice.
He spent several hours each day in the OOB's workshop, often with
Blueshell. Reality graphics were a new thing to him, but after a few weeks
he was beyond toy prototypes. The pressure suits he built had power packs
and weapons stores. "We don't know what things may be like when we arrive;
powered armor could be real useful."
At the end of each work day they would all meet on the command deck, to
compare notes, to consider the latest from Jefri and Mr. Steel, to review
the drive status. For Ravna this could be the happiest time of the day ...
and sometimes the hardest. Pham had rigged the display automation to show
castle walls all around. A huge fireplace replaced the normal window on comm
status. The sound of it was almost perfect; he had even coaxed a small
amount of "fire" heat from that wall. This was a castle hall out of Pham's
memory, from Canberra he said. But it wasn't that different from the Age of
Princesses on Nyjora (though most of those castles had been in tropical
swamps, where big fireplaces were rarely used). For some perverse reason,
even the Riders seemed to enjoy it; Greenstalk said it reminded her of a
trading stop from her first years with Blueshell. Like travelers who have
walked through a long day, the four of them rested in the coziness of a
phantom lodge. And when the new business was settled, Pham and the Riders
would trade stories, often late into the "night".
Ravna sat beside him, the least talkative of the four. She joined in
the laughter and sometimes the discussion: There was the time Blueshell had
a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption, and Ravna knew some
stories of her own to illustrate the Rider's opinion. But this was also the
hardest time for her. Yes, the stories were wonderful. Blueshell and
Greenstalk had been so many places, and at heart they were traders. Swindles
and bargains and good done were all part of their lives. Pham listened to
his friends, almost enraptured ... and then told his own stories, of being a
prince on Canberra, of being a Slow Zone trader and explorer. And for all
the limitations of the Slowness, his life's adventures surpassed even the
Skroderiders'. Ravna smiled and tried to pretend enthusiasm.
For Pham's stories were too much. He honestly believed them, but she
couldn't imagine one human seeing so much, doing so much. Back on Relay, she
had claimed his memories were synthetic, a little joke of Old One. She had
been very angry when she said it, and more than anything she wished she
never had ... because it was so clearly the truth. Greenstalk and Blueshell
never noticed, but sometimes in the middle of a story Pham would stumble on
his memories and a look of barely concealed panic would come to his eyes.
Somewhere inside, he knew the truth too, and she suddenly wanted to hug him,
comfort him. It was like having a terribly wounded friend, with whom you can
talk but never mutually admit the scope of the injuries. Instead she
pretended the lapses didn't exist, smiling and laughing at the rest of his
story.
And Old One's jape was all so unnecessary. Pham didn't have to be a
great hero. He was a decent person, though ebullient and kind of a
rule-breaker. He had every bit as much persistence as she, and more courage.
What craft Old One must have had to make such a person, what ... Power.
And how she hated Him, for making a joke of such a person.
Of Pham's godshatter, there was scarcely a sign. For that Ravna was
very grateful. Once or twice a month he had a dreamy spell. For a day or two
after he would go nuts with some new project, often something he couldn't
clearly explain. But it wasn't getting worse; he wasn't drifting away from
her.
"And the godshatter may save us in the end," he would say when she had
the courage to ask him about it. "No, I don't know how." He tapped his
forehead. "It's still god's own crowded attic up here. "It's more than
memory. Sometimes it needs all my mind to think with and there's no room
left for self-awareness, and afterwards I can't explain, but... sometimes I
have a glimmer. Whatever Jefri's parents brought to the Tines' world: it can
hurt the Blight. Call it an antidote -- better yet, a countermeasure.
Something taken from the Perversion as it was aborning in the Straumli lab.
Something the Perversion didn't even suspect was gone until much later."
Ravna sighed. It was hard to imagine good news that was also so
frightening. "The Straumers could sneak something like that right out from
the Perversion's heart?"
"Maybe. Or maybe, Countermeasure used the Straumers to escape the
Perversion. To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the
plan might work, Rav, at least if I -- if Old One's godshatter -- can get
down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of
the Beyond upside down -- hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least
of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it's looking in all
the wrong places. We'll have our chance at Countermeasure."
She thought of Jefri's messages. "The rot on the walls of Jefri's ship.
You think that's what it is?"
Pham's eyes went vague. "Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says
it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He
seems a little disgusted by it.... That's good, probably keeps his Tinish
friends away from it."
A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham's mind too.
And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would
stand before that unknown and Old One's dead hand would act ... through
Pham. Ravna shivered, and didn't say anything more for a time.
Month by month, the gunpowder project stayed right on the schedule of
the library's development program. The Tines had been able to make the stuff
easily; there had been very little backtracking through the development
tree. Alloy testing had been the critical event that slowed things, but they
were over the hump there too. The packs of "Hidden Island" had built the
first three prototypes: breech-loading cannon that were small enough to be
carried by a single pack. Jefri guessed they could begin mass production in
another ten days.
The radio project was the weird one. In one sense it was behind
schedule; in another, it had become something more than Ravna had ever
imagined. After a long period of normal progress, Jefri had come back with a
counterplan. It consisted of a complete reworking of the tables for the
acoustic interface.
"I thought these jokers were first-time medievals," Pham Nuwen said
when he saw Jefri's message.
"That's right. And in principle, they just reasoned out consequences to
what we sent them. The want to support pack-thought across the radio."
"Hunh. Yes. We described how the tables specified the transducer grid
-- all in nontechnical Samnorsk. That included showing how small table
changes would make the grid different. But look, our design would give them
a three kilohertz band -- a nice, voice-grade connection. You're telling me
that implementing this new table would give'em two hundred kilohertz."
"Yes. That's what my dataset says."
He grinned his cocky smile. "Ha! And that's my point. Sure, in
principle we gave them enough information to do the mod. It looks to me like
making this expanded spec table is equivalent to solving a, hmm," he counted
rows and columns, "a five-hundred-node numerical PDE. And little Jefri
claims that all his datasets are destroyed, and that his ship computer is
not generally usable."
Ravna leaned back from the display. "Sorry. I see what you mean." You
get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget what it must be like
without them. "You ... you think this might be, uh, Countermeasure's doing?"
Pham Nuwen hesitated, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility.
Then, "No ... no, it's not that. I think this 'Mister Steel' is playing
games with our heads. All we have is a byte stream from 'Jefri'. What do we
really know about what's going on?"
"Well, I'll tell you some things I know. We are talking to a young
human child who was raised in Straumli Realm. You've been reading most of
his messages in Trisk translation. That loses a lot of the colloquialisms
and the little errors of a child who is a native speaker of Samnorsk. The
only way this might be faked is by a group of human adults.... And after
twenty plus weeks of knowing Jefri, I'll tell you even that is unlikely."
"Okay. So suppose Jefri is for real. We have this eight-year-old kid
down on the Tines' world. He's telling us what he considers to be the truth.
I'm saying it looks like someone is lying to him. Maybe we can trust what he
sees with his own eyes. He says these creatures aren't sapient except in
groups of five or so. Okay. We'll believe that." Pham rolled his eyes.
Apparently his reading had shown how rare group intelligences were this side
of the Transcend. "The kid says they didn't see anything but small towns
from space, and that everything on the ground is medieval. Okay, we'll buy
that. But. What are the chances that this race is smart enough to do PDE's
in their heads, and do them from just the implications in your message?"
"Well, there have been some humans that smart." She could name one case
in Nyjoran history, another couple from Old Earth. If such abilities were
common among the packs, they were smarter than any natural race she had
heard of. "So this isn't first-time medievalism?"
"Right. I bet this is some colony fallen on hard times -- like your
Nyjora and my Canberra, except that they have the good luck of being in the
Beyond. These dog packs have a working computer somewhere. Maybe it's under
control of their priest class; maybe they don't have much else. But they're
holding out on us."
"But why? We'd be helping them in any case. And Jefri has told us how
this group saved him."
Pham started to smile again, the old supercilious smile. Then he
sobered. He was really trying to break that habit. "You've been on a dozen
different worlds, Ravna. And I know you've read about thousands more, at
least in survey. You probably know of varieties of medievalism I've never
guessed. But remember, I've actually been there.... I think." The last was a
nervous mutter.
"I've read about the Age of Princesses," Ravna said mildly.
"Yes.... and I'm sorry for belittling that. In any medieval politics,
the blade and the thought are closely connected. But they become much more
closely bound for someone who's lived through it. Look, even if we believe
everything that Jefri says he has seen, this Hidden Island Kingdom is a
sinister thing."
"You mean the names?"
"Like Flensers, Steel, Tines? Harsh names aren't necessarily
meaningful." Pham laughed. "I mean, when I was eight years old, one of my
titles was already 'Lord Master Disemboweler'." He saw the look on Ravna's
face and hurriedly added, "And at that age, I hadn't even witnessed more
than a couple of executions! No, the names are only a small part of it. I'm
thinking of the kid's description of the castle -- which seems to be close
by the ship -- and this ambush he thinks he was rescued from. It doesn't add
up. You asked 'what could they gain from betraying us'. I can see that
question from their point of view. If they are a fallen colony, they have a
clear idea what they've lost. They probably have some remnant technology,
and are paranoid as hell. If I were them, I'd seriously consider ambushing
the rescuers if those rescuers seemed weak or careless. And even if we come
on strong ... look at the questions Jefri asks for Steel. The guy is
fishing, trying to figure out what we really value: the refugee ship, Jefri
and the coldsleepers, or something on the ship. By the time we arrive, Steel
will probably have wiped the local opposition -- thanks to us. My guess is
we're in for some heavy blackmail when we get to Tines' world."
I thought we were talking about the good news. Ravna paged back through
recent messages. Pham was right. The boy was telling the truth as he knew
it, but.... "I don't see how we can play things any differently. If we don't
help Steel against the Woodcarvers -- "
"Yeah. We don't know enough to do much else. Whatever else is true, the
Woodcarvers seem a valid threat to Jefri and the ship. I'm just saying we
should be thinking about all the possibilities. One thing we absolutely
mustn't do is show interest in Countermeasure. If the locals know how
desperate we are for that, we don't have a chance.
"And it may be time to start planting a few lies of our own. Steel's
been talking about building a landing place for us -- within his castle.
There's no way OOB could fit, but I think we should play along, tell Jefri
that we can separate from our ultradrive, something like his container ship.
Let Steel concentrate on building harmless traps...."
He hummed one of his strange little "marching" tunes. "About the radio
thing: why don't we compliment the Tines real casually for improving our
design. I wonder what they'd say?"
Pham Nuwen got his answer less than three days later. Jefri Olsndot
said that he had done the optimization. So if you believed the kid, there
was no evidence for hidden computers. Pham was not at all convinced: "So
just by coincidence, we have Isaac Newton on the other end of the line?"
Ravna didn't argue the point. It was an enormous bit of luck, yet.... She
went over the earlier messages. In language and general knowledge, the boy
seemed very ordinary for his age. But occasionally there were situations
involving mathematical insight -- not formal, taught math -- where Jefri
said striking things. Some of those conversations had been under fine
conditions, with turnaround times of less than a minute. It all seemed too
consistent to be the lie Pham Nuwen thought.
Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.
There was always something: problems with the Tines' developments,
fears that the murderous Woodcarvers might attack Mr. Steel, worries about
the steadily degrading drive spines and Zone turbulence that slowed OOB's
progress even further. Life was by turns and at once frustrating, boring,
frightening. And yet ...
One night about four months into the flight, Ravna woke in the cabin
she had come to share with Pham. Maybe she had been dreaming, but she
couldn't remember anything except that it had been no nightmare. There was
no special noise in the room, nothing to wake her. Beside her, Pham was
sleeping soundly in their hammock net. She eased her arm down his back,
drawing him gently toward her. His breathing changed; he mumbled something
placid and unintelligible. In Ravna's opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the
experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone
... that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring
and effortless.
Ravna looked around the dimly-lit cabin, trying to imagine what had
woken her. Maybe it had just been the problems of the day -- Powers knew
there had been enough of those. She nestled her face against Pham's
shoulder. Yes, always problems, but ... in a way she more content than she
had been in years. Sure there were problems. Poor Jefri's situation. All the
people lost at Straum and Relay. But she had three friends, and a love.
Alone in a tiny ship bound for the Bottom, she was less lonely than she'd
been since leaving Sjandra Kei. More than ever in her life, maybe she could
do something to help with the problems.
And then she guessed, part in sadness, part in joy, that years from now
she might look back on these months as goldenly happy.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
And finally, almost five months out, it was clear there was no hope of
going on without repairing the drive spines. The OOB was suddenly doing only
a quarter of a light-year per hour in a volume that tested good for two. And
things were getting worse. They would have no trouble making it to
Harmonious Repose, but beyond that ...
Harmonious Repose. An ugly name, thought Ravna. Pham's "light-hearted"
translation was worse: Rest In Peace. In the Beyond, almost everything
habitable was in use. Civilizations were transient and races faded ... but
there were always new people moving up from Below. The result was most often
patchwork, polyspecific systems. Young races just up from the Slowness lived
uneasily with the remnants of older peoples. According to the ship's
library, RIP had been in the Beyond for a long time. It had been
continuously inhabited for at least two hundred million years, time for ten
thousand species to call it home. The most recent notes showed better than
one hundred racial terranes. Even the youngest was the residue of a dozen
emigrations. The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.
So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were
flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they'd be able to listen to the
News the whole way in.
Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external
goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious,
hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the
creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from
just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users.
Too bad we can't follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in
Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible
methods of payment.
Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Call to action
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay
Key phrases: Action, not talk
Text of message:
Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the
Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment
we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will
need support services including free Net time.
In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports
our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the
human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of
victory -- or wait, and be destroyed.
Death to vermin.
There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about
who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There
were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the
fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups.
Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still
making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that
way.
Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers
generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than
conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a
single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they
do after all?"
Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are
hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have
taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began.... By the Powers,
I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since
she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something
from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than
she realized. Now....
On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been
working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear
for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving
force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them
would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded
there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or
bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."
Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would
stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a
ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei
would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for
nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one
thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to
look like anything human."
And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of
Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders
went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances
that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded?
Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things
human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if
necessary.
Pham Nuwen checked what they did -- and found more than one slip-up.
For a barbarian programmer, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly
reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more
sophisticated than what he had known.
Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB
was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based
on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed
of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe
built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it.
RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check
and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to
match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and
"Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta
be honest, right?")
Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers
from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was
spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even
though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was
surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet.
The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural
view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet.
Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides,
hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects --
structures? -- sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast
needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed
more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt,
and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring
system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or
on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred
kilometers across ... but there appeared to be thousands of them.
At "Saint Rihndell's" direction they brought the ship down to the ring
plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big
impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. "Just like old, old
times," Pham Nuwen said.
In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it
looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were
objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of
icy froth -- gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly
motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In
the plane of the rings, they couldn't see more than a few hundred meters.
The debris blocked further views. And it wasn't all loose. Greenstalk
pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by
them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. "Looks like a single
structure," she said.
Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the
"frothy snowballs" sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks
long.... The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it
was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of
snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with
images from their approach, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better
than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered
along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure
could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart
briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was
vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time
Nyjoran railway.
Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc.
The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the
modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled
heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers,
they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths
were occupied.
Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell's business specs. "Hmm. Hm.
Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy." He angled some fronds back at the
ships in the exterior view.
Pham: "Maybe he's running a junkyard."
Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for
their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred
years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the
two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with "Saint
Rihndell".
"Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would
remember the type even if I'd never ridden a Skrode. But our business here
is not like anything we've done before."
Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his
cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic
stuff that protected what it covered.
This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring
systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly,
there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the
repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business
sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across
his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the
cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it
came to renting bandwidth -- or maybe it was simply cautious.
Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He
was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was
encrypted.
"Yes."
The Skroderiders passed through OOB's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc
habitat.
From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows
that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's
current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view,
but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat
swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central
fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of
a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow
surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like
food in a slow tidal surge.
The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body
plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The
tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment,
one such drifted out from the wall near the OOB's lock. It buzzed something
that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs
moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled
behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk,
"The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider
humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs -- evolved
from flippers or jaws or whatever -- were all very good for movement on
land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.
The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying
slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell
kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch
that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going?
What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at
Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term
memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.
Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to
understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller.... helper
creatures those are.... allies of big new customer..." Their guide's limited
speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more
than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of
Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in
Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or
Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important
questions: What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I
persuade you to part with it? Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out
the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and
ability.
It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell
chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's
recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of
others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could
work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And
this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above
would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore
articulated pressure suits -- the force-field suits of the High Beyond would
last only a few weeks down here.
They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks
circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of
meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there
was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane
beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a
thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had
seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed
against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on
their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration ... but she
doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be
clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.
Greenstalk had visited eight ring system civilizations in her life.
They were a common consequence of accidents and wars (and occasionally, of
deliberate habitat design). According to OOB's library, Harmonious Repose
had been a normal planetary system up till ten million years ago. Then
there'd been a real estate dispute: A young race from Below had thought to
colonize and exterminate the moribund inhabitants. The attack had been a
miscalculation, for the moribund could still kill and the system was reduced
to rubble. Perhaps the young race survived. But after ten million years, if
there were any of those young killers left they would now be the most frail
of the systems' elder races. Perhaps a thousand new races had passed through
in that time, and almost every one had done something to tailor the rings
and the gas cloud left from the debacle. What was left was not a ruin at
all, but old ... old. The ship's library claimed that no race had
transcended from Harmonious Repose in a thousand years. That fact was more
important than all the others. The current civilizations were in their
twilight, refining mediocrity. More than anything else, the system had the
feel of an old and beautiful tide pool, groomed and tended, shielded from
the exciting waves that might upset its bansai plumes. Most likely the
tusk-legs were the liveliest species about, perhaps the only one interested
in trade with the outside.
Their car slowed and spiraled into a small tower.
"By the Fleet, what I wouldn't give to be out there with them!" Pham
Nuwen waved at the views coming in from the skrode cameras. Ever since the
Riders left, he'd been at the windows, alternately gaping wide-eyed at the
ringscape and bouncing abstractedly between the command deck's floor and
ceiling. Ravna had never seen him so absorbed, so intense. However
fraudulent his memories of trading days, he truly thought he could make a
difference. And he may be right.
Pham came down from the ceiling, pulled close to the screen. It looked
like serious bargaining was about to begin. The Skroderiders had arrived in
a spherical room perhaps fifty meters across. Apparently they were floating
near the center of it. A forest grew inward from all directions, and the
Riders seemed to float just a few meters from the tree tops. Here and there
between the branches, they could see the ground, a mosaic of flowers.
Saint Rihndell's sales creatures were scattered all about the tallest
trees. They sat(?) with their ivory limbs twined about the tree tops.
Tusk-leg races were a common thing in the galaxy, but these were the first
Ravna had known. The body plan was totally unlike anything from home, and
even now she didn't have a clear idea of their appearance. Sitting in the
trees, their legs had more of the aspect of a skeletal fingers grasping
around the trunk. Their chief rep -- who claimed to be Saint Rihndell itself
-- had scrimshaw covering two-thirds of its ivory. Two of the windows showed
the carving close up; Pham seemed to think that understanding the artwork
might be useful.
Progress was slow. Triskweline was the common language, but good
interpreting devices didn't work this deep in the Beyond, and Saint
Rihndell's folk were only marginally familiar with the trade talk. Ravna was
used to clean translations. Even the Net messages she dealt with were
usually intelligible (though sometimes misleadingly so).
They'd been talking for twenty minutes and had only just established
that Saint Rihndell might have the ability to repair OOB. It was the usual
Riderly driftiness, and something more. The tedium seemed to please Pham
Nuwen, "Rav, this is almost like a Qeng Ho operation, face to face with
critters and scarcely a common language."
"We sent them a description of our repair problem hours ago. Why should
it take so long for a simple yes or no?"
"Because they're haggling," said Pham, his grin broadening. "'Honest'
Saint Rihndell here -- " he waved at the scrimshawed local, "-- wants to
convince us just how hard the job is.... Lord I wish I was out there."
Even Blueshell and Greenstalk seemed a little strange now. Their
Triskweline was stripped down, barely more complex than Saint Rihndell's.
And much of the discussion seemed very round about. Working for Vrinimi,
Ravna had had some experience with sales and trading. But haggling? You had
your pricing data bases and strategy support, and directions from Grondr's
people. You either had a deal or you didn't. What was going on between the
Riders and Saint Rihndell was one of the more alien things Ravna had ever
seen.
"Actually, things are going pretty well ... I think. You saw when we
arrived, the bone legs took away Blueshell's samples. By now they know
precisely what we have. There's something in those samples that they want.
"Yeah?"
"Sure. Saint Rihndell isn't bad-mouthing our stuff for his health."
"Damn it, it's possible we don't have anything on board they could
want. This was never intended to be a trade expedition." Blueshell and
Greenstalk had scavenged "product samples" from the ship's supplies, things
that the OOB could survive without. These included sensoria and some Low
Beyond computer gear. Some of that would be a serious loss. But one way or
another, we need those repairs.
Pham chuckled. "No. There's something there Saint Rihndell wants.
Otherwise he wouldn't still be jawing.... And see how he keeps needling us
about his 'other customers' needs'? Saint Rihndell is a human kind of a
guy."
Something like human song came over the link to the Riders. Ravna
phased Greenstalk's cameras toward the sound. From the forest "floor" on the
far side of Blueshell, three new creatures had appeared.
"Why ... they're beautiful. Butterflies," said Ravna.
"Huh?"
"I mean they look like butterflies. You know? Um. Insects with large
colored wings."
Giant butterflies, actually. The newcomers had a generally humanoid
body plan. They were about 150 centimeters tall and covered with
soft-looking brown fur. Their wings sprouted from behind their shoulder
blades. At full spread they were almost two meters across, soft blues and
yellows, some more intricately patterned than others. Surely they were
artificial, or a gengineered affectation; they would have been useless for
flying about in any reasonable gravity. But here in zero-gee.... The three
floated at the entrance for just a moment, their huge, soft eyes looking up
at the Riders. Then they swept their wings in measured sweeps, and drifted
gracefully into the air above the forest. The entire effect was like
something out of a children's video. They had pert, button noses, like pet
jorakorns, and eyes as wide and bashful as any human animator ever drew.
Their voices sounded like youngsters singing.
Saint Rihndell and his buddies sidled around their tree tops. The
tallest visitor sang on, its wings gently flexing. After a moment, Ravna
realized it was speaking fluent Trisk with a front end adapted to the
creature's natural speech:
"Saint Rihndell, greetings! Our ships are ready for your repairs. We
have made fair payment, and we are in a great hurry. Your work must begin at
once!" Saint Rihndell's Trisk specialist translated the speech for his boss.
Ravna leaned across Pham's back. "So maybe our friendly repairman
really is overbooked," she said.
"... Yeah."
Saint Rihndell came back around his treetop. His little arms picked at
the green needles as he made a reply. "Honored Customers. You made offer of
payment, not fully accepted. What you ask is in short supply, difficult to
... do."
The cuddly butterfly made a squeaking noise that might have passed for
joyous laughter in a human child. The sense behind its singing was
different: "Times are changing, Rihndell creature! Your people must learn:
We will not be stymied. You know my fleet's sacred mission. We count every
passing hour against you. Think on the fleet you will face if your lack of
cooperation is ever known -- is ever even suspected." There was a sweep of
blue and yellow wings, and the butterfly turned. Its dark, bashful eyes
rested on the Riders. "And these potted plants, they are customers? Dismiss
them. Till we are gone, you have no other customers."
Ravna sucked in a breath. The three had no visible weapons, but she was
suddenly afraid for Blueshell and Greenstalk.
"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
According to the clock, it took less than half an hour for the
Skroderiders to make it back. It seemed a lot longer to Pham Nuwen, even
though he tried to keep up a casual front with Ravna. Maybe they were both
keeping up a front; he knew she still considered him a fragile case.
But the Riders' cameras showed no more signs of the killer butterflies.
Finally the cargo lock cracked open and Blueshell and Greenstalk were back.
"I was sure the wily tusk-legs was just pretending there was strong
demand," said Blueshell. He seemed as eager to rehash the story as Pham was.
"Yeah, I thought so too. In fact, I still think those butterflies might
just be part of an act. It's all too melodramatic."
Blueshell's fronds rattled in a way that Pham recognized as a kind of
shiver. "I wager not, Sir Pham. Those were Aprahanti. Just the look of them
fills you with dread, does it not? They're rare these days, but a star
trader knows the stories. Still ... this is a little much even for
Aprahanti. Their Hegemony has been on the wane for several centuries." He
rattled something at the ship, and the windows were filled with views of
nearby berths in the repair harbor. There was more Rider rattling, this time
between Greenstalk and Blueshell. "Those other ships are a uniform type, you
know. A High Beyond design like ours, but more, um, ... militant."