A Fire Upon the Deep (25 page)

Pham Nuwen remembered almost nothing of the first days after dying, after the pain of the Old One's ending. Ghostly figures, anonymous words. Someone said he'd been kept alive in the ship's surgeon. He remembered none of it. Why they kept the body breathing was a mystery and an affront. Eventually the animal reflexes had revived. The body began breathing of its own accord. The eyes opened. No brain damage, Greenstalk(?) said, a full recovery. The husk that had been a living being spoke no contradiction.

What was left of Pham Nuwen spent a lot of time on the
OOB
's bridge. From before, the ship reminded him of a fat sowbug. The bugs had been common in the straw laid across the floor of the Great Hall of this father's castle on Canberra. The little kids had played with them. The critters didn't have real legs, just a dozen feathery spines sticking out from a chitinous thorax. No matter how you tumbled them, those spines/antennas would twitch the bug around and it would scuttle on its way, unmindful that it might be upside down from before. Yes, the
OOB
's ultradrive spines looked a lot like a sowbug's, though not as articulate. And the body itself was fat and sleek, slightly narrowed in the middle.

So Pham Nuwen had ended inside of a sowbug. How fitting for a dead man.

And now he sat on the bridge. The woman brought him here often; she seemed to know it should fascinate him. The walls were displays, better than he had ever seen in merchantman days. When the windows looked out the ship's exterior cameras, the view was as good as from any crystal-canopy bridge in the Qeng Ho fleet.

It was like something out of the crudest fantasy -- or a graphics simulation. If he sat long enough, he could actually see the stars
move
in the sky. The ship was doing about ten hyperjumps per second: jump, recompute and jump again. In this part of The Beyond they could go a thousandth of a light-year on each jump -- farther, but then the recompute time would be substantially worse. At ten per second that added up to more than thirty light-years per hour. The jumps themselves were imperceptible to human senses, and between the jumps the were in free fall, carrying the same intrinsic velocity they'd had on departing Relay. So there was none of the doppler shifting of relativistic flight; the stars were as pure as seen from some desert sky, or in low-speed transit. Without any fuss, they simply slid across the sky, the closer ones the faster. In half an hour he went farther than he had in half a century with the Qeng Ho.

Greenstalk drifted onto the bridge one day, began changing the windows. As usual she spoke to Pham as she did so, chatting almost as if there were a real person here to listen:

"See. The center window is an ultrawave map of the region directly behind us." Greenstalk waved a tendril over the controls. The multicolored pictures appeared on the other walls. "Similarly for the other five points of direction."

The words were noise in Pham's ears, understood but of no interest. The Rider paused, then continued with something like the futile persistence of the Ravna woman.

"When ships make a jump ... when they reenter, there's a kind of an ultrawave
splash
. I'm checking if we're being followed."

Colors on the windows all around, even in front of Pham's eyes. There were smooth gradations, no bright spots, no linear features.

"I know, I know," she said, making up both sides of the conversation. "The ship's analyzers are still massaging the data. But if anyone's pacing us closer than one hundred light-years, we'll see them. And if they're farther than that -- well, then they probably can't detect
us
."

It doesn't matter.
Pham almost shut the question out of his mind. But there were no stars to look at; he stared at the glowing colors and actually thought about the problem.
Thought.
A joke: no one Down Here ever really thought about anything. Perhaps ten thousand starships had escaped the Fall of Relay. Most likely, the Enemy had not cataloged those departures. The attack on Relay had been a minor adjunct to the murder of Old One. Most likely, the
OOB
had escaped unnoticed. Why should the Enemy care where the last of Old One's memories might be hiding? Why should it care about where their little ship might be bound?

A tremor passed through his body; animal reflex, surely.

Panic was slowly rising in Ravna Bergsndot, every day a little stronger. It was not any particular disaster, just the slow dying of hope. She tried to be near Pham Nuwen part of every day, to talk to him, to hold his hand. He never responded, not even -- except perhaps by accident -- to look at her. Greenstalk tried too. Alien though Greenstalk was, the Pham of before had seemed truly attracted to the Riders. He was off all medical support now, but he might as well have been a vegetable.

And all the while their descent was slowing, always a little worse than what Blueshell had predicted.

And when she turned to the News ... in some ways that was the most horrifying of all. The "death race" theory was getting popular. More and more, there were folk who seemed to think that the human race was spreading the Blight:

The bastards even played on humanity's foundling nature. Foundling races were rare, but scarcely unknown. Now these Death-to-Vermin creatures were turning the Miracle of Nyjora into something deadly evil.

Death to Vermin were the only ones to call for pogroms, but even respected posters were saying things that indirectly might support such action:

Date: 11.94 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

The Blight admits that it is a Power that teleoperates sophonts in the Beyond. But consider how difficult it is to have a close-coupled automation with time lags of more than a few milliseconds. The Known Net is a perfect illustration of this: Lags range between five milliseconds for systems that are a couple of light-years apart -- to (at least) several hundred seconds when messages must pass through intermediate nodes. This, combined with the low bandwidth available across interstellar distances, makes the Known Net a loose forum for the exchange of information and lies. And these restrictions are
inherent
in the nature of the Beyond, part of the same restrictions that make it impossible for the Powers to exist down here.

We conclude that even the Blight can't attain close-coupled control except in the High Beyond. At the Top, the Blight's sophont agents are literally its limbs. In the Middle Beyond, we believe mental "possession" is possible but that considerable preprocessing must be done in the controlled mind. Furthermore, considerable external equipment (the bulky items characteristic of those depths) is needed to support the communication. Direct, millisecond-by-millisecond, control is normally impractical in the Middle Beyond. Combat at this level would involve hierarchical control. Long-term operations would also use intimidation, fraud, and traitors.

These are the threats that you of the Middle and Low Beyond should recognize.

Even some of humanity's supporters sent a chill through Ravna:

Date: 18.29 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

I have obtained specimens from the human worlds in our volume. Detailed analysis is available in the Homo sapiens interest group archive. My conclusions: previous (but less intensive) analysis of human phys/psych is correct. The race has
no
built-in structures to support remote control. Experiments with living subjects showed no special inclination toward submission. I found little or no evidence of artificial optimization. (There was evidence of DNA surgery to improve disease resistance: drift timing dated the hackwork at two thousand years Before Present. The blood of Straumli Realm subjects carried an optigens, Thirault [a cheap medical recipe that can be tailored across a wide mammalian range].) This race -- as represented by our specimens -- looks like something that arrived from the Slow Zone quite recently, probably from a single origin world.

Date: 19.43 days since Fall of Relay

Text of message:

Who is this "Hanse?" It makes objective, tough-sounding noises about testing human specimens, but it keeps its own nature secret. Don't be fooled by humans telling you about themselves! In fact, we have no way of testing the creatures that dwell in Straumli Realm; their protector will see to that.

And there was a little boy trapped at the bottom of the well. Some days, no communication was possible. Other days, when the
OOB
antenna swarm was tuned in exactly the right direction and when the vagaries of the zone favored it -- then Ravna could hear his ship. Even then the signal was so faint, so distorted, that the effective transmission rate was just a few bits per second.

Jefri and his problems might be only the smallest footnote to the story of the Blight (less than that, since no one knew of him), but to Ravna Bergsndot these conversations were the only bright thing in her life just now.

The kid was very lonely, but less so now, she thought. She learned about his friend Amdi, about the stern Tyrathect and the heroic Mr. Steel and the proud Tines. Ravna smiled to herself, at herself. The walls of her cabin displayed a flat mural of jungle. Deep in the drippy murk lay regular shadows -- a castle built in the roots of a giant mangrove tree. The mural was a famous one; the original had been an analog work from three thousand years ago. It showed life at an even further remove, during the Dark Ages on Nyjora. She and Lynne had spent much of their childhood imagining that they were transported to such a time. Little Jefri was trapped in the real thing. Woodcarver's butchers were no interstellar threat, but they were a deadly horror to those around them. Thank goodness Jefri had not seen the killing.

This was a real medieval world. A tough and unforgiving place, even if Jefri had fallen in with fair-minded people. And the Nyjoran comparison was only vaguely appropriate. These Tines were pack minds; even old Grondr 'Kalir had been surprised at that.

All through Jefri's mail, Ravna could see the panic among Steel's people: