A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

  Note 252

  “And the Transcend?” Pham said. “Is that just the far dark?” The dark between the galaxies.

  Ravna laughed softly. “It includes all that but … see the outer reaches of the spirals. They’re in the Transcend.” Most everything farther than forty thousand light-years from the galactic center was.

  Pham Nuwen was silent for a long moment. She felt a tiny shiver pass through him. “After talking to the wheelies, I — I think I understand more of what you were warning me about. There’s a lot of things I don’t know, things that could kill me … or worse.”

  Note 253

  Common sense triumphs at last.“True,” she said quietly. “But it’s not just you, or the brief time you’ve been here. You could study your whole life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? It’s not a good analogy, but it’s the only safe one; we are like dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different things people do to animals — ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal — each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not exist.” She waved at the misty star swarms. “The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We’re so far down that the beings on the surface — superior though they are — can’t effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don’t even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place.” She paused. There was more to the analogy. “And just as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories — but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices. Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can’t make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor.”

  Pham turned toward her, away from window and the stars. “So there are always ‘fish’ edging close to the surface.” For an instant she thought she had lost him, that he was caught by the romance of the Transcendent deathwish. “Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood … and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.” She felt him shiver and then his arms were around her. She tilted her head up and found his lips waiting.

  Note 254

  It had been two years since Ravna Bergsndot left Sjandra Kei. In some ways the time had gone fast. Just now her body was telling her what a long, long time it had really been. Every touch was so vivid, waking desires carefully suppressed. Suddenly her skin was tingling all over. It took marvelous restraint to undress without tearing anything.

  * * *

  Ravna was out of practice. And of course she had nothing recent to compare to…. But Pham Nuwen was very, very good.

  Note 255

  Crypto: 0

  Syntax: 43

  As received by: Transceiver Relay01 at Relay

  Language path: Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK:Relay units

  Note 256

  From: Net Administrator for Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down

  Subject: Complaints about Relay, a suggestion

  Summary: It’s getting worse; try us instead

  Key phrases: communications problems, Relay unreliability, Transcend

  Distribution:

  Communication Costs Special Interest Group

  Motley Hatch Administration Group

  Transceiver Relay01 at Relay

  Transceiver Not-for-Long at Shortstop

  Follow-ups to: Windsong Expansion Interest Group

  Note 257

  Date: 07:21:21 Docks Time, 36/09 of Org year 52089

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  Text of message:

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  During the last five hundred hours, Comm Costs shows 9,834 transceiver-layer congestion complaints against the Vrinimi operation at Relay. Each of these complaints involves services to tens of thousand of planets. Vrinimi has promised again and again that the congestion is a purely temporary increase of Transcendent usage.

  As Relay’s chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we thought it inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the problem.

  Note 261

  The events of the last seven hours compel us to change this policy. Those reading this item already know about the incident; most of you are the victims of it. Beginning at [00:00:27 Docks Time], Vrinimi Org began taking transceivers off-line, an unscheduled outage. R01 went out at 00:00:27, R02 at 02:50:32, R03 and R04 at 03:12:01. Vrinimi stated that a Transcendent customer was urgently requesting bandwidth. (R00 had been previously dedicated to that Power’s use.) The customer required use of both up- and down-link bandwidth. By the Org’s own admission, the unscheduled usage exceeded sixty percent of their entire capacity. Note that the excesses of the preceding five hundred hours — excesses which caused entirely justified complaint — were never more than five percent of Org capacity.

  Friends, we of Windsong are in the long-haul communication business. We know how difficult it is to maintain transceiver elements that mass as much as a planet. We know that hard contract commitments simply cannot be made by suppliers in our line of work. But at the same time, the behavior of Vrinimi Org is unacceptable. It’s true that in the last three hours the Org has returned R01 through R04 to general service, and promised to pass on the Power’s surpayment to all those who were “inconvenienced”. But only Vrinimi knows how large these surpayments really are. And no one (not even Vrinimi!) knows whether this is the end of the outages.

  What is to Vrinimi a sudden, incredible cash glut, is to the rest of you an unaccountable disaster.

  Therefore Windsong at Debley Down is considering a major — and permanent — expansion of our service: the construction of five additional backbone tranceivers. Obviously this will be immensely expensive. Transceivers are never cheap, and Debley Down does not have quite the geometry enjoyed by Relay. We expect the cost must be amortized over many decades of good business. We can’t undertake it without clear customer commitment. In order to determine this demand, and to ensure that we build what is really needed, we are creating a temporary newsgroup, Windsong Expansion Interest Group, moderated and archived at Windsong. Send/Receive charges to transceiver-layer customers on this group will be only ten percent our usual. We urge you, our transceiver-layer customers, to use this service to talk to each other, to decide what you can safely expect from Vrinimi Org in the future and how you feel about our proposals.

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  We are waiting to hear from you.

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  Chapter 9

  Note 264

  Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly around … a large pillow. Damn. He’d already left. She lay back for a second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last night she hadn’t realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense … what a strange thing.

  The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive nonsense. “Yes?”

  It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? “I’m sorry to bother you, Ravna, but — are you all right?” The Rider interrupted herself.

  Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange: sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. “Yes, I’m fine.” Fine! “What’s up?”

  “We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were so highly placed. We’d been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org
to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we were told the survey is being undertaken immediately.”

  “Um.” Say what?“That’s wonderful, but I’m not sure I — who’s paying for it, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, but it is expensive. We were told they’re dedicating a backbone tranceiver to the search. If there’s anyone transmitting, we should know in a matter of hours.”

  They chatted for a few more minutes, Ravna gradually becoming more coherent as she parceled the various aspects of the last ten hours into business and pleasure. She had half expected the Org to bug her at The Wandering Company. Maybe Grondr just heard the story there — and gave it full credit. But just yesterday, he’d been wimping about transceiver saturation. Either way, this was good news — perhaps extraordinarily good. If the Riders’ wild story were true, the Straumli Perversion might be less than Transcendent. And if the refugee ships had some clues on how to bring it down, Straumli Realm might even be saved.

  After Greenstalk rang off, Ravna wandered about the apartment, getting herself in shape, playing the various possibilities against each other. Her actions became more purposeful, almost up to their usual speed. There were a lot of things she wanted to check into.

  Note 265

  Then the phone was ringing again. This time she previewed the caller. Oops! It was Grondr Vrinimikalir. She combed her hand back through her hair; it still looked like crap, and this phone was not up to deception. Suddenly she noticed that Grondr didn’t look so hot either. His facial chitin was smudged, even across some of his freckles. She accepted the call.

  “Ah!” His voice actually squeaked, then returned to its normal level. “Thank you for answering. I would have called earlier, except things have been very … chaotic.” Just where had his cool distance gone? “I just want you to know that the Org had nothing to do with this. We were totally taken in until just a couple of hours ago.” He launched into a disjointed description of massive demand swamping the Org’s resources.

  As he rambled, Ravna punched up a summary of recent Relay business. By the Powers that Be: Sixty percent diversion? Excerpts from Comm Costs: She scanned quickly down the item from Windsong. The gasbags were as pompous as ever, but their offer to replace Relay was probably for real. It was just the sort of thing Grondr had been afraid might happen.

  “— Old One just kept asking for more and more. When we finally figured things out, and confronted him…. Well, we came close to threatening violence. We have the resources to destroy his emissary vessel. No telling what his revenge might be, but we told Old One his demands were already destroying us. Thank the Powers, he just seemed amused; he backed off. He’s restricted to a single transceiver now, and that’s on a signal search that has nothing to do with us.”

  Hmm. One mystery solved. Old One must have been snooping around The Wandering Company and overheard the Skroderiders’ story.“Maybe things will be okay, then. But it’s important to be just as tough if Old One tries to abuse us again.” The words were already out of her mouth before she considered who she was giving advice to.

  Grondr didn’t seem to notice. If anything, he was the one scrambling to agree: “Yes, yes. I’ll tell you, if Old One were any ordinary customer, we’d blacklist him forever for this deception…. But then if he were ordinary, he could never have fooled us.”

  Grondr wiped pudgy white fingers across his face. “No mere Beyonder could have altered our record of the dredge expedition. Not even one from the Top could have broken into the junkyard and manipulated the remains without our even suspecting.”

  Dredge? Remains? Ravna began to see that she and Grondr were not talking about the same thing. “Just what did Old One do?”

  “The details? We’re pretty sure of them now. Since the Fall of Straum, Old One has been very interested in humans. Unfortunately, there were no willing ones available here. It began manipulating us, rewriting our junkyard records. We’ve recovered a clean backup from a branch office: The dredge really did encounter the wreck of a human ship; there were human body parts in it — but nothing that we could have revived. Old One must have mixed and matched what it found there. Perhaps it fabricated memories by extrapolating from human cultural data in the archives. With hindsight, we can match its early requests with the invasion of our junkyard.”

  Grondr rattled on, but Ravna wasn’t listening. Her eyes stared blindly through the phone’s display. We are little fish in the abyss, protected by the deep from the fishers above. But even if they can’t live down here, the clever fisherfolk still have their lures and deadly tricks. And so Pham — “Pham Nuwen is just a robot, then,” she said softly.

  Note 266

  “Not precisely. He is human, and with his fake memories he can operate autonomously. But when Old One buys full bandwidth, the creature is fully an emissary device.” The hand and eye of a Power.

  Grondr’s mouthparts clattered in abject embarrassment. “Ravna, we don’t know all that happened last night; there was no reason to have you under close surveillance. But Old One assures us that its need for direct investigation is over. In any case, we’ll never give him the bandwidth to try again.”

  Note 267

  Ravna barely nodded. Her face suddenly felt cold. She had never felt such anger and such fright at the same time. She stood in a wave of dizziness and walked away from the phone, ignoring Grondr’s worried cries. The stories from grad school came tumbling through her mind, and the myths of a dozen human religions. Consequences, consequences. Some of them she could defend against; others were past repair.

  Note 268

  And from somewhere in the back of her mind, an incredibly silly thought crawled out from under the horror and the rage. For eight hours she had been face to face with a Power. It was the sort of experience that made a chapter in textbooks, the sort of thing that was always far away and misreported. And it was the sort of thing no one in all of Sjandra Kei could come near to claiming. Until now.

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  Chapter 10

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  Note 274

  Johanna was in the boat for a long time. The sun never set, though now it was low behind her, now it was high in front, now all was cloudy and rain plinked off the tarp covering her blankets. She spent the hours in an agonized haze. Things happened that could only have been dreams. There were creatures pulling at her clothes, blood sticking everywhere. Gentle hands and rat snouts dressed her wounds, and forced chill water down her throat. When she thrashed around, Mom rearranged her blankets and comforted her with the strangest sounds. For hours, someone warm lay beside her. Sometimes it was Jefri; more often it was a large dog, a dog that purred.

  The rain passed. The sun was on the left side of the boat, but hidden behind a cold, snapping shadow. More and more, the pain became divisible. Part of it was in her chest and shoulder; that stabbed through her whenever the boat wobbled. Part of it was in her gut, an emptiness that was not quite nausea … she was so hungry, so thirsty.

  Note 275

  More and more, she was remembering, not dreaming. There were nightmares that would never go away. They had really happened. They were happening now.

  * * *

  The sun peeked in and out of the tumble of clouds. It slid slowly lower across the sky till it was almost behind the boat. She tried to remember what Daddy had been saying just before … everything went bad. They were in this planet’s arctic, in the summer. So the sun’s low point must be north, and their twin-hulled boat was sailing roughly southwards. Wherever they were going, it was minute by minute farther from the spacecraft and any hope of finding Jefri.

  Note 276

  Sometimes the water was like open sea, the hills distant or hidden by low clouds. Sometimes they passed through narrows, and swept close to walls of naked rock. She’d had no idea a sailboat could move so fast or be so dangerous. Four of the rat creatures worked desperately to keep them off the rocks. Th
ey bounded nimbly from mast platform to railing, sometimes standing on each other’s shoulders to extend their reach. The twin-hulled boat tilted and groaned in water that was suddenly rough. Then they’d be through and the hills would be at a peaceful distance, sliding slowly past.

  For a long while, she pretended delirium. She moaned, she twisted. She watched. The boat hulls were long and narrow, almost like canoes. The sail was mounted between them. The shadow in her dreams had been that sail, snapping in the cold, clean wind. The sky was an avalanche of grays, light and dark. There were birds up there. They dipped past the mast, circled again and again. There was twittering and hissing all around her. But the sound did not come from the birds.

  Note 277

  It was the monsters. She watched them through lowered lashes. These were the same kind that killed Mom and Dad. They even wore the same funny clothes, gray-green jackets studded with stirrups and pockets. Dogs or wolves she had thought before. That didn’t really describe them. Sure, they had four slender legs and pointy little ears. But with their long necks and occasionally pinkish eyes, they might as well be huge rats.

  And the longer she watched them, the more horrible they seemed. A still image could never convey that horror; you had to see them in action. She watched four of them — the ones on her side of the boat — play with her dataset. The Pink Oliphaunt was tied in a net bag near the rear of the boat. Now the beasts wanted to look it over. At first it looked like a circus act, the creatures’ heads darting this way and that. But every move was so precise, so coordinated with all the others. They had no hands, but they could untie knots, each holding a piece of twine in its mouth and maneuvering its necks around others. At the same time, one’s claws held the loose netting tight against the railing. It was like watching puppets run off the same control.

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