A Fire Upon the Deep (26 page)

Woodcarver's raiders would return, and this time in enough force to overrun Steel's little kingdom. Back when they thought
OOB
's flight would be only thirty or forty days, that had not seemed great a risk, but now .... Ravna might arrive to find Woodcarver's murdering complete.

Oh Pham, dear Pham. If you ever really were, please come back now.
Pham Nuwen of medieval Canberra. Pham Nuwen, trader from the Slowness....
What would someone such as you make of this? Hmm.

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Ravna knew that -- under his bluster -- Blueshell was at least as much a worrier as she. Worse, he was a nitpicker. The next time Ravna asked him about their progress, he retreated into technicalities.

Finally Ravna broke in, "Look. The kid is sitting on something that
just might
blow the Blight sky high, and all he has are bows and arrows. How the long will it be till we get down there, Blueshell?"

Blueshell rolled nervously back and forth across the ceiling. The Skroderiders had reaction jets; they could maneuver in free fall more adroitly than most humans. Instead they used stick-patches, and rolled around on the walls. In a way, it was kind of cute. Just now, it was irritating.

At least they could talk; she glanced across the bridge to where Pham Nuwen sat facing the bridge's main display. As usual, all his attention was fixed on the slowly moving stars. He was unshaven, his reddish beard bright on his skin; his long hair floated snarled and uncombed. Physically he was cured of his injuries. Ship's surgeon had even replaced the muscle mass that Old One's communication equipment had usurped. Pham could dress and feed himself now, but he still lived in a private dreamworld.

The two riders twittered at each other. It was Greenstalk who finally answered her question: "Truly, we're not sure how long. The quality of the Beyond changes as we descend. Each jump is taking us a fraction longer than the one before."

"I know that. We're moving toward the Slow Zone. But the ship is designed for that; it should be an easy matter to extrapolate the slowing."

Blueshell extended a tendril from ceiling to floor. He diddled with the matte corrugations for a second and then his voder made a sound of human embarrassment. "Ordinarily you would be correct, my lady Ravna. But this is a special case.... For one thing, it appears that the zones themselves are in flux."

"What?"

"It's not that unheard of. Small shifts are going on all the time. That's a major purpose for bottom-lugger ships: to track the changes. We're having the bad luck to run through the middle of the uncertainty."

Actually, Ravna had known that interface turbulence was high at the Bottom below here. She just didn't think of it in grandiose terms like "zone shifting"; she also hadn't realized it was serious enough to affect them yet.

"Okay. How bad can it get then? How much can it slow us?"

"Oh my." Blueshell rolled to the far wall; he was standing on starry sky now. "It would be nice to be a Low Skroderider. So many problems my high calling brings me. I wish I could be deep in surf right now, thinking on olden memories." Of other days in the surf.

Greenstalk carried on for him: "It's not 'the tide, how high can it rise?' It's 'this storm, how bad can it get?' Right now it is worse than anything in this region during the last thousand years. However, we have been following the local news; most agree that the storm has peaked. If our other problem gets no worse, we should arrive in about one hundred and twenty days."

Our other problem.
Ravna drifted to the center of the bridge and strapped onto a saddle. "You're talking about the damage we took getting out of Relay. The ultradrive spines, right? How are they holding up?"

"Quite well, apparently. We've not tried to jump faster than eighty percent of design max. On the other hand, we lack good diagnostics. It's conceivable that serious degradation might happen rather suddenly."

"Conceivable, but unlikely," put in Greenstalk.

Ravna nodded. Considering all their other problems, there was no point in contemplating possibilities beyond their control. Back on Relay, this had looked like a thirty or forty day trip. Now ... the boy in the well might have to be brave for a long time yet, no matter how much she wished otherwise.
Hmm. Time for Plan B then. Time for what someone like Pham Nuwen might suggest.
She pushed off the floor and settled by Greenstalk. "Okay, so the best we can plan on is one hundred and twenty days. If the Zone surge gets worse or if we have to get repairs..." Get repairs where? That might be only a delay, not an impossibility. The rebuilt
OOB
was supposed to be to repairable even in the Low Beyond. "Maybe even two hundred days." She glanced at Blueshell, but he didn't interrupt with his usual amendments and qualifications. "You've both read the messages we're getting from the boy. He says the locals are going to be overrun, probably in less than one hundred days. Somehow, we have to help him ... before we actually arrive there."

Greenstalk rattled her fronds in a way Ravna took for puzzlement.

She looked across the deck at Pham, and raised her voice a trifle.
Hey you, you should be an expert on this!
"You Skroderiders may not recognize it, but this is a problem that's been seen a million times in the Slow Zone: civilizations are separated by years -- centuries -- of travel time. They fall into dark ages. They become just as primitive as the pack creatures, these 'Tines'. Then they get visited from outside. In a short time, they have technology back again." Pham's head did not turn; he just looked out across the starscape.

The Skroderiders rattled at each other, then:

"But how can that help us? Doesn't rebuilding a civilization take dozens of years?"

"And besides, there's nothing to rebuild on the Tines' world. According to the child, this is a race without antecedents. How long does it take to found a civilization?"

Ravna waved a hand at the objections.
Don't stop me, I'm on a roll.
"That's not the point.
We
are in communication with them. We have a good general library on board. Original inventors don't know where they're going; they're groping in the dark. Even the archaeologist/engineers of Nyjora had to reinvent much. But we know everything about making airplanes and such; we know hundreds of ways of going at it." Now faced with necessity, Ravna was suddenly sure they could do it. "We can study all the development paths, eliminate the dead ends. Even more, we can find the quickest way to go from medieval to specific inventions, things that can beat whatever barbarians are attacking Jefri's friends."

Ravna's speech tumbled to a stop. She stared, grinning, first at Greenstalk and then at Blueshell. But a silent Skroderider is one of the universe's more impassive audiences. It was hard even to tell if they were looking at her. After a moment Greenstalk said, "Yes, I see. And rediscovery being so common in the Slow Zone, most of this may already be worked out in the ship's library."

That's when it happened: Pham turned from the window. He looked across the deck at Ravna and the Riders. For the first time since Relay, he spoke. Even more, the words weren't nonsense, though it took her a moment to understand. "Guns and radios," he said.

"Ah ... yes." She looked back at him.
Think of something to make him say more.
"Why those in particular?"

Pham Nuwen shrugged. "It worked on Canberra."

Then damn Blueshell started talking, something about doing a library search. Pham stared at them for moment, his face expressionless. He turned back to watch the stars, and the moment was lost.

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"Pham?" He heard Ravna's voice just behind him. She had stayed on the bridge after the Riders left, departing on whatever meaningless preparations their meeting had ordained. He didn't reply, and after a moment she drifted around and blocked his view of the stars. Almost automatically, he found himself focussing on her face.

"Thank you for talking to us.... We need you more than ever."

He could still see lots of stars. They were all around her, slowly moving. Ravna cocked her head, the way she did when she meant friendly puzzlement. "We can help...."

He didn't answer. What
had
make him speak just now? Then: "You can't help the dead," he said, vaguely surprised at his own speaking. Like eye focussing, the speech must be a reflex.

"You're not dead. You're as alive as I am."

Then words tumbled from him; more than in all the days since Relay. "True. The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you? From the outside, from Old One's view --" He looked away from her, dizzy with a doubled vision.

Ravna drifted closer till her face was just centimeters from his. She floated free, except for one foot tucked into the floor. "Dear Pham, you are wrong. You've been at the Bottom, and at the Top, but never in between. ... 'The illusion of self-awareness'? That's a commonplace of any practical philosophy in the Beyond. It has some beautiful consequences, and some scary ones. All you know are the scary ones. Think: the illusion must apply just as surely to the Powers."

"No. He could
make
devices like you and I."

"Being dead is a choice, Pham." She reached out to pass her hand down his shoulder and arm. He had a typical 0-gee change of perspective; "down" seemed to rotate sideways, and he was looking up at her. Suddenly he was aware of his splotchy beard, his tangled hair floating all about. He looked up at Ravna, remembering everything he'd thought about her. Back on Relay she'd seemed bright; maybe not smarter than he, but as smart as most competitors of the Qeng Ho. But there were other memories, how Old One had seen her. As usual, His memories were overwhelming; about this one woman, there was more insight than from all Pham's life experience. As usual, it was mostly unintelligible. Even His emotions were hard to interpret. But ... He had thought of Ravna a little like ... a favored dog. Old One could see right through her. Ravna Bergsndot was a little manipulative; He had been pleased/amused(?) by that fact. But behind her talk and argument, He'd seen a great deal of ... "goodness" might be the human word. Old One had wished her well.
In the end, He had even tried to help.
Insight flitted past him, too fast to catch. Ravna was talking again:

"What happened to you is terrible enough, Pham, but it's happened to others. I've read of cases. Even the Powers are not immortal. Sometimes they fight among themselves, and someone gets killed. Sometimes, one commits suicide. There's a star system, Gods' Doom it's called in the story: A million years ago, it was in the Transcend. It was visited by a party of the Powers. There was a Zone surge. Suddenly the system was twenty light-years deep in the Beyond. That's about the biggest surge there is firm record of. The Powers at Gods' Doom didn't have a chance. They all died, some to rot and rusted ruin ... others to the level of mere human minds."

"W-what became of those?"

She hesitated, took one of his hands between hers. "You can look it up. The point is, it happens. To the victims, it's the end of the world. But from
our
side, the human side.... Well, the human Pham Nuwen was lucky; Greenstalk says the failure of Old One's connections didn't do gross organic damage. Maybe there's subtle damage; sometimes the remnants just destroy themselves, whatever is left."

Pham felt tears leaking from his eyes. And knew that part of the deadness inside had been grief for His own death. "Subtle damage!" He shook his head and the tears drifted into the air. "My head is stuffed with Him, with His memories." Memories? They towered over everything else.
Yet he could not understand them.
He could not understand the details. He could not even understand the emotions, except as inane simplifications -- joy, laughter, wonder, fear and icy-steel determination. Now, he was lost in those memories, wandering like an idiot in a cathedral. Not understanding, cowering before icons.

She pivoted around their clasped hands. After a moment, her knee bumped gently against his. "You're still human, you still have your own --", her own voice broke as she saw the look in his eyes.

"My own memories?" Scattered amid the unintelligible he would stumble on them: himself at five years, sitting on the straw in the great hall, alert for the appearance of any adult; royals were not supposed to play in the filth. Ten years later, making love to Cindi for the first time. A year after that, seeing his first flying machine, the orbital ferry that landed on his father's parade field. The decades aspace. "Yes, the Qeng Ho. Pham Nuwen, the great Trader of the Slowness. All the memories are still there. And for all I know, it's all the Old One's lie, an afternoon's fraud to fool the Relayers."

Ravna bit her lip, but didn't say anything. She was too honest to lie, even now.

He reached with his free hand to brush her hair away from her face. "I know you said that too, Rav. Don't feel bad: I would have caught on by now anyway."

"Yeah," she said softly. Then she was looking him straight in the eye. "But know this. One human to another: You
are
a human now. And there could have been a Qeng Ho, and you could have been exactly what you remember. And whatever the past, you could be great in the future."

Ghostly echoes, more than memory and less than reason: For an instant he saw her with wiser eyes.
She loves you, foolish one.
Almost laughter, kindly laughter.

He slid his arms around her, drawing her tight against him. She was so real. He felt her slip her leg between his. To laugh. Like heart massage, unthinking reflex bringing a mind back to life. So foolish, so trivial, but, "I -- I want to come back." The words came out strangled in sobs. "There's so much inside me now, so much I can't understand. I'm lost inside my own head."

She didn't say anything, probably couldn't even understand his speech. For a moment, all he knew was the feel of her in his arms, hugging back.
Oh please, I do want to come back.