A Fire Upon the Deep (31 page)

"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 "lighthearted" 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:

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.