A Fire Upon the Deep (23 page)

-=*=-

Down the well of the night.
Even when Ravna wasn't looking out the windows, that was the image in her mind. Relay was far off the galactic disk. The
OOB
was descending toward that disk -- and ever deeper into slowness.

But they had escaped. The
OOB
was crippled, but they had left Relay at almost fifty light-years per hour. Each hour they were lower in the Beyond and the computation time for the microjumps increased, and their pseudovelocity declined. Nevertheless, they were making progress. They were deep into the Middle of the Beyond now. And there was no sign of pursuit, thank goodness. Whatever had brought the Blight to Relay, it had not been specific knowledge of the
OOB
.

Hope. Ravna felt it growing in her. The ship's medical automation claimed that Pham Nuwen could be saved, that there was brain activity. The terrible wounds in his back had been Old One's implants, organic machinery that had made Pham close-linked to Relay's local network -- and thence to the Power above. And when that Power died somehow the gear in Pham became a putrescent ruin.
So Pham the person should still exist. Pray he still exists.
The surgeon thought it would be three days before his back was healed enough to attempt resuscitation.

In the meantime.... Ravna was learning more about the apocalypse that had swept over her. Every twenty hours, Greenstalk and Blueshell jigged the ship sideways a few light-years, into some major trunk line of the Known Net to soak up the News. It was a common practice on any voyage of more than a few days; an easy way for merchants and travelers to keep track of events that might affect their success at voyage's end.

According to the News (that is, according to the vast majority of the opinions expressed), the fall of Relay was complete.
Oh, Grondr. Oh Egravan and Sarale. Are you dead or owned now?

Parts of the Known Net were temporarily out of contact; some of the extra-galactic links might not be replaced for years. For the first time in millennia, a Power was known to have been murdered. There were tens of thousands of claims about the motive for the attack and tens of thousands of predictions about what would happen next. Ravna had the ship filter the avalanche, trying to distill the essence of the speculations.

The one coming from Straumli Realm itself made as much sense as any: the Perversion's thralls gloated solemnly about the new era, the marriage of a Transcendent being with races of the Beyond. If Relay could be destroyed -- if a Power could be murdered -- then nothing could stop the spread of victory.

Some senders thought that Relay was the ancestral target of whatever had perverted Straumli Realm. Maybe the attack was just the tail end of some long ago war, a misbegotten tragedy for the descendants of forgotten races. If so, then the thralls at Straumli Realm might just wither away and the original human culture there reappear.

A number of items suggested that the attack had been aimed at stealing Relay's archives, but only one or two claimed that the Blight sought to recover an artifact, or prevent the Relayers from recovering one. Those assertions came from chronic theorizers, the sort of civilizations that get surcharged by newsgroup automation. Nevertheless, Ravna looked through those messages carefully. None of them suggested an artifact in the Low Beyond; if anything, they claimed the Blight was searching for something in the High Beyond or Low Transcend.

There was network traffic coming out of the Blight. The high protocol messages were ignored by all but the suicidal, and no one was getting paid to forward any of it. Yet horror and curiosity spread some of the messages far. There was the Blighter "video": almost four hundred seconds of pan-sensual data with no compression. That incredibly expensive message might be the most-forwarded hog in all Net history. Blueshell held the
OOB
on the trunk path for nearly two days to receive the whole thing.

The Perversion's thralls all appeared to be human. About half the news items coming out of the Realm were video evocations, though none this long; all showed human speakers. Ravna watched the big one again and again: She even recognized the speaker. Øvn Nilsndot had been Straumli Realm's champion trael runner. He had no title now, and probably no name. Nilsndot spoke from an office that might have been a garden. If Ravna stepped to the side of the image, she could see over his shoulder to ground level. The city there looked like the Straumli Main of record. Years ago, Ravna and her sister had dreamed about that city, the heart of mankind's adventure into the Transcend. The central square had been a replica of the Field of Princesses on Nyjora, and the immigration advertising claimed that no matter how far the Straumers went, the fountain in the Field would always flow, would always show their loyalty to humankind's beginnings.

There was no fountain now, and Ravna felt deadness behind Nilsndot's gaze. "This one speaks as the Power that Helps," said the erstwhile hero. "I want all to see what I can do for even a third-rate civilization. Look upon my Helping...." The viewpoint swung skywards. It was sunset, and the ranked agrav structures hung against the light, megameter upon megameter. It was a more grandiose use of the agrav material than Ravna had ever seen, even on the Docks. Certainly no world in the Middle Beyond could ever afford to import the material in such quantities. "What you see above me is just the work barracks for the construction that I will soon begin in the Straumli system. When complete, five star systems will be a single habitat, their planets and excess stellar mass distributed to support life and technology as never before seen at these depths -- and as rarely seen in the Transcend itself." The view returned to Nilsndot, a single human, mouthpiece for a god. "Some of you may rebel against idea of dedicating yourselves to me. In the long run it does not matter. The symbiosis of my Power with the hands of races in the Beyond is more than any can resist. But I speak now to diminish your fear. What you see in Straumli Realm is as much a joy as a wonder. Never again will races in the Beyond be left behind by transcendence. Those who join me -- and all will join eventually -- will be part of the Power. You will have access to imports from across the Top and Lower Transcend. You will reproduce beyond the limits your own technology could sustain. You will absorb all that oppose me. You will bring the new stability."

The third or fourth time she watched the item, Ravna tried to ignore the words, concentrate on Nilsndot's expression, comparing it to speeches she had in her personal dataset. There was a difference; it wasn't her imagination. The creature she watched was soul-dead. Somehow, the Blight didn't care that that was obvious ... maybe it wasn't obvious except to human viewers, and they were a vanishingly small fraction of the audience. The viewpoint closed in on Nilsndot's ordinary dark face, his ordinary violet eyes:

"Some of you may wonder how all this is possible, and why billions of years of anarchy have passed without such help from a Power. The answer is ... complex. Like many sensible developments, this one has a high threshold. On one side of that threshold, the development appears impossibly unlikely; on the other, inevitable. The symbiosis of the Helping depends on efficient, high-bandwidth communication between myself and the beings I Help. Creatures such as the one now speaking my words must respond as quickly and faithfully as a hand or a mouth. Their eyes and ears must report across light-years. This has been hard to achieve -- especially since the system must essentially be in place before it can function.
But
, now that the symbiosis exists, progress will come much faster. Almost any race can be modified to receive Help."

Almost any race can be modified.
The words came from a familiar face, and in Ravna's birth language ... but the origin was monstrously far away.

There was plenty of analysis. A whole news group had been formed: Threat of the Blight was spawned from Threats Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group, and Close-Coupled Automation. These days it was busier than any five other groups. In this part of the galaxy, a significant fraction of all message traffic belonged to the new group. More bits were sent analyzing poor Øvn Nilsndot's mouthing than had been in the original. Judging from the flames and contradictions, the signal-to-noise ratio was very low:

Date: 7.06 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

Date: 7.91 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

And some messages were patent nonsense. One thing about the Net: the multiple, automatic translations often disguised the fundamental alienness of participants. Behind the chatty, colloquial postings, there were faraway realms, so misted by distance and difference that communication was impossible -- even though it might take a while to realize the fact. For instance:

Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

Hexapodia? Six legs? Three pairs of legs? Probably none of these translations was close to what the bewildered creature of Twirlip had in its mind. Ravna didn't read any more of that posting.

Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

Khurvark University thinks the Blight is a fraud because elements of the former regime have survived on Straum. There is another explanation. Suppose the Blight is indeed a Power, and that its claims of effective symbiosis are generally true. That means that the creature being "Helped" is no more than a remotely controlled device, his brain simply a local processor supporting the communication. Would
you
want to be helped like that? My question isn't completely rhetorical; the readership is wide enough that there may be some of you who would answer "yes". However, the vast majority of naturally evolved, sentient beings would be revolted by the notion. Surely the Blight knows this. My guess is that the Blight is
not
a fraud -- but that the notion of surviving culture in Straumli Realm
is
. Subtly, the Blight wanted to convey the impression that only some are directly enslaved, that cultures as a whole will survive. Combine that with Blight's claim that not all races can be teleoperated. We're left with the subtext that immense riches are available to races that associate themselves with this Power, yet the biological and intellectual imperatives of these races will still be satisfied.