A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

  Old One’s gonna let you join the human race after all? But Ravna was touched. She dropped her eyes from his. “I guess I owe you one too. If Old One won’t help, he won’t help; I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

  Pham Nuwen laughed softly, “Yours was certainly the lesser error. I’m still trying to figure out where I went wrong, and … I don’t think I have time now to learn.”

  He looked back at the sea. After a moment, Ravna stood and stepped toward him. Up close, his stare looked glassy. “What’s wrong?”Damn you, Old One. If you’re going to abandon him, don’t do it in pieces!

  “You’re the great expert on Transcendent Powers, eh?”

  More sarcasm. “Well—”

  “Do the big boys have wars?”

  Ravna shrugged. “You can find rumors of everything. We think there’s conflict, but something too subtle to call war.”

  “You’re pretty much right. There is struggle, but it has more angles than anything down here. The benefits of cooperation are normally so great that…. That’s part of the reason I didn’t take the Perversion seriously. Besides, the creature is pitiful: a wimpy cur that fouls its own den. Even if it wanted to kill other Powers, something like that never could. Not in a billion years….”

  Blueshell rolled up beside them. “Who is this, my lady?”

  Note 497

  It was the sort of Riderish conversation-stopper that she was only just getting used to. If Blueshell would just get in synch with his skrode memory, he’d know. Then the question truly hit her. Who is this? She glanced at her dataset. It was showing transceiver status, had been ever since Pham Nuwen arrived. And … by the Powers, three transceivers had been grabbed by a single customer!

  She took a quick step backwards. “You!”

  “Me! Face to face once more, Ravna.” The leer was a parody of Pham’s self-assured smile. “Sorry I can’t be charming tonight.” He slapped his chest awkwardly. “I’m using this thing’s underlying instincts…. I’m too busy trying to stay alive.”

  There was drool coming down his chin. Pham’s eyes would focus on her and then drift.

  “What are you doing to Pham!”

  The Emissary Device stepped toward her, stumbled. “Making room,” came Pham Nuwen’s voice.

  Ravna spoke Grondr’s phone code. There was no response.

  The Emissary Device shook its head. “Vrinimi Org is very busy right now, trying to convince me to get off their equipment, trying to screw up their courage and force me off. They don’t believe what I’m telling them” He laughed, a quick choking sound. “Doesn’t matter. I see now that the attack here was just a deadly diversion…. How about that, Little Ravna? See, the Blight is not a Class Two perversion. In the time I have left, I can only guess what it is…. Something very old, very big. Whatever it is, I’m being eaten alive.”

  Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled close to Ravna. Their fronds made faint skritching noises. Some thousands of light-years away, well into the Transcend, a Power was fighting for its life. And all they saw of it was one man turned into a slobbering lunatic.

  “So that’s my apology, Little Ravna. Helping you probably wouldn’t have saved me.” His voice strangled on itself, and he took a gasping breath. “But helping you now will be a measure of — vengeance is a motive you would understand. I’ve called your ship down. If you move fast and don’t use agrav, you may survive the next hour.”

  Blueshell’s voice was timid and blustery at the same time. “Survive? Only a conventional attack could work down here, and there is no sign of one.”

  A maniac surrounded by the soft, quiet night. Ravna’s dataset showed nothing strange except for the diversion of bandwidth to Old One.

  Note 498

  Pham Nuwen made a coughing laugh. “Oh, it’s conventional

  Note 499

  enough, but very clever. A few grams of replicant disorder, wafted in over weeks. It’s blossoming now, timed with the attack you see…. The growth will die in a matter of hours, after it kills all of Relay’s precious High automation…. Ravna! Take the ship, or die in the next thousand seconds. Take the ship. If you survive, go to the Bottom. Get the….” the Emissary Device pulled itself straighter, and smiled its greenish smile a last time. “And here is my gift to you, the best help I have left to give.”

  The smile disappeared. The glassy look was replaced by a wonder … and then mounting terror. Pham Nuwen dragged in a great breath, and had time for one barking scream before he collapsed. He landed face down, twitching and choking in the sand.

  Ravna shouted Grondr’s code again, and ran to Pham Nuwen. She pulled him over on his back and tried to clear his mouth. The fit lasted several seconds, Pham’s limbs flailing randomly about. Ravna collected several solid hits as she tried to steady him. Then Pham went limp, and she could barely feel his breath.

  Blueshell was saying, “Somehow he’s grabbed the OOB. It’s four thousand kilometers out, coming straight for the Docks. Wail. We’re ruined.” Unauthorized flight close to the Docks was cause for confiscation.

  Somehow Ravna didn’t think it mattered anymore. “Is there any sign of attack?” she said over her shoulder. She eased Pham’s head back, made sure he had a clear breathing passage.

  Random rustling between the Skroderiders. Greenstalk: “Something is strange. We have service suspension on the main transceivers.”So Old One is still transmitting?“The local net is very clogged. Much automation, many employees being called to special duty.”

  Ravna rocked back. The sky was night dark, punctuated by a dozen bright points of light — ships guiding for the Docks. All very normal. But her own dataset was showing what Greenstalk reported.

  “Ravna, I can’t talk right now.” Grondr’s clickety voice sounded out of the air beside her. This would be his associate program. “Old One has taken most of Relay. Watch out for the Emissary Device.”A little late, that!“We’ve lost contact with the surveillance fence beyond the transceivers. We are having program and hardware failures. Old One claims we are being attacked.” A five second pause. “We see evidence of fleet action at the domestic defense boundary.” That was just a half light-year out.

  Note 500

  “Brap!” From Blueshell. “At the domestic defense boundary! How could you miss them coming in?” He rolled back and forth, pivoted.

  Note 501

  Grondr’s associate ignored the question. “Minimum three thousand ships. Destruction of transceivers immin—”

  “Ravna, are the Skroderiders with you?” It was still Grondr’s voice, but more staccato, more involved. This was the real guy.

  “Y-yes.”

  “The local network is failing. Life support failing. The Docks will fall. We would be stronger than the attacking fleet, but we’re rotting from the inside…. Relay is dying.” His voice sharpened, clattering, “but Vrinimi will not die, and a contract is a contract! Tell the Riders, we will pay them … somehow, someday. We require… plead … they fly the mission we contracted. Ravna?”

  “Yes. They hear.”

  “Then go!” And the voice was gone.

  Blueshell said, “OOB will be here in two hundred seconds.”

  Pham Nuwen had calmed, and his breathing was easier. As the two Riders chittered back and forth, Ravna looked around — and suddenly realized that all the death and destruction had been reports from afar. The beach and the sky were almost as placid as ever. The last of the sun’s rays had left the waves. The foam was a dim band in the low green light. Here and there, yellow lights glowed in the trees and the farther towers.

  Yet the alarum had clearly spread. She could hear datasets coming on. Some of the beach fires guttered out, and the figures around them ran into the trees or drifted upwards, headed for farther offices. Now starships floated up from their berths across the sea, falling higher and higher till they glittered in the departed sunlight.

  It was Relay’s last moment of peace.

  A patch of glowing dark spread across the sky. She gasped at
light so twisted it should have gone unseen. It shone more in the back of her head than in her eyes. Afterwards she couldn’t think what made it objectively different from blackness.

  Note 502

  “There’s another!” said Blueshell. This one was near the Decks’ horizon, a blot of darkness perhaps a degree across. The edges were an indistinct bleeding of black into black.

  “What is it?” Ravna was no war freak, but she’d read her share of adventure stories. She knew about antimatter bombs and relativistic KE slugs. From a distance such weapons were bright spots of light, sometimes an orchestrated flickering. Or closer: a world- wrecker would glow incandescent across the curve of a planet, splashing the globe itself like a drop of water, but slow, slow. Those were the images her reading had prepared her for. What she saw now was more like a defect in her eyesight than a vision of war.

  Note 503

  Powers only knew what the Skroderiders saw, but: “Your main transceivers … vaping out, I think,” said Blueshell.

  “Those are light-years out! There’s no way we could see—” Another splotch appeared, not even in her field of view. The color floated, placeless. Pham Nuwen spasmed again, but weakly. She had no trouble holding him still, but … blood dribbled from his mouth. The back of his shirt was wet with something that stank of decay.

  “OOB will be here in one hundred seconds. Plenty of time, there’s plenty of time.” Blueshell rolled back and forth around them, talking reassurance that just showed how nervous he was. “Yes, my lady, light-years out. And years from now, the flash of their going will light the sky for anyone still alive here. But only a fraction of the vape-out is making light. The rest is an ultrawave surge so great that ordinary matter is affected…. Optic nerves tickled by the overflow…. So much that your own nervous system becomes a receiver.” He spun around. “But don’t worry. We’re tough and quick. We’ve squeezed through close spots before.” There was something absurd about a creature with no short-term memory bragging up its lightning reflexes. She hoped his skrode was up to this.

  Note 504

  Greenstalk’s voice buzzed painfully loud. “Look!”

  The surf line was drawing back, further than she had ever seen it.

  “The sea is falling!” shouted Greenstalk. Water’s edge had pulled back a hundred meters, two hundred. The green-limned horizon was dipping.

  “Ship’s still fifty seconds out. We’ll fly to meet it. Come, Ravna!”

  Ravna’s own courage died cold that second. Grondr had said the Docks would fall! The near sky was crowded now as dozens of people raced for safety. A hundred meters away the sand itself was shifting, an avalanche tilting toward the abyss. She remembered something Old One had said, and suddenly she knew the fliers were making a terrible mistake. The thought cut through her terror. “No! Just head for higher ground.”

  The night was silent no more. A bell-like moaning came from the sea. The sound spread. The sunset breeze grew to a gale that twisted the trees toward the water, sending branches and sand sweeping past them.

  Note 505

  Ravna was still on her knees, her hands pressing down on Pham’s limp arms. No breath, no pulse. The eyes stared sightlessly. Old One’s gift to her. Damn all the Powers! She grabbed Pham Nuwen under the shoulders and rolled him onto her back.

  She gagged, almost lost her grip. Underneath his shirt she felt cavities where there should be solid flesh. Something wet and rank dripped around her sides. She struggled up from her knees, half- carrying and half-dragging the body.

  Blueshell was shouting, “— take hours to roll anywhere.” He drifted off the ground, driving his agrav against the wind. Skrode and Rider twisted drunkenly for an instant … and then he was slammed back to the ground, tumbled willy-nilly toward the wind’s destination, the moaning hole that had been the sea. Greenstalk raced to his seaward side, blocking his progress toward destruction. Blueshell righted himself and the two rolled back toward Ravna. The Rider’s voice was faint in the wind: “… agrav … failing!” And with it the very structure of the Docks.

  They walked and wheeled their way back from the sucking sea. “Find a place to land the OOB.”

  The tree line was a jagged range of hills now. The landscape changed before their eyes and under her feet. The groaning sound was everywhere, some places so loud it buzzed through Ravna’s shoes. They avoided sagging terrain, the sink holes that opened on all sides. The night was dark no more. Whether it was emergency lighting or a side- effect of the agrav failure, blue glowed along the holes. Through those holes they saw the cloud-decked night of Groundside a thousand kilometers below. The space between was not empty. There were shimmering phantoms: billions of tonnes of water and earth … and hundreds of dying fliers. Vrinimi Org was paying the price for building their Docks on agrav instead of inertial orbit.

  Somehow the three were making progress. Pham Nuwen was almost too heavy to carry/drag; she staggered left and right almost as much as she moved forward. Yet he was lighter that she would have guessed. And that was terrifying in its own way: was even the high ground failing?

  Note 506

  Most of the agravs died by failure, but some suffered destructive runaway: clumps of trees and earth ripped free from the tops of hillocks and accelerated upwards. The wind shifted back and forth, up and down … but it was thinner now, the noise remote. The artificial atmosphere that clothed the Docks would soon be gone. Ravna’s pocket pressure suit worked for a few minutes, but now it was fading. In a few minutes it would be as dead as her agravs … as dead as she would be. She wondered vaguely how the Blight had managed this. Like the Old One, she would likely die without ever knowing.

  She saw torch flares; there were ships. Most had boosted for inertial orbits or gone directly into ultradrive, but a few hung over the disintegrating landscape. Blueshell and Greenstalk led the way. The two used their third axles in ways Ravna had never guessed at, lifting and pushing to clamber up slopes that she could scarcely negotiate with Pham’s weight dragging from her back.

  They were on a hilltop, but not for long. This had been part of the office forest. Now the trees stuck out in different directions, like hair on a mangy dog. She felt the ground throbbing beneath her feet. What next? The Skroderiders rolled from one side of the peak to another. They would be rescued here or nowhere. She went to her knees, resting most of Pham’s weight on the ground. From here you could see a long ways. The Docks looked like a slowly flapping flag, and every immense whip of the fabric broke fragments loose. As long as some consensus remained among the agrav units, it still had planar aspect. That was disappearing. There were sink holes all around their little knob of forest. On the horizon, Ravna saw the far edge of the Docks detach itself and turn slowly sideways: a hundred kilometers long, ten wide, it swept down on would-be rescue ships.

  Note 507

  Blueshell brushed against her left side, Greenstalk against her right. Ravna twisted, laying some of Pham’s weight on the skrode hulls. If all four merged their pressure suits, there would be a few more moments of consciousness. “The OOB : I’m flying it down!” he said.

  Note 508

  Something was coming down. A ship’s torch lit the ground blue white, with shadows stark and shifting. It’s not a healthy thing to be around a rocket drive hovering in a near-one-gee field. An hour earlier the maneuver would have been impossible, or a capital offense if accomplished. Now it didn’t matter if the torch punched through the Docks or fried a cargo from halfway across the galaxy.

  Still … where could Blueshell land the thing? They were surrounded by sinkholes and moving cliffs. She closed her eyes as the burning light drifted down before them … and then dimmed. Blueshell’s shout was thin in their shared atmosphere. “Let’s go together!”

  Note 509

  She held tight to the Riders, and they crawled/wheeled down from their little hill. The Out of Band II was hovering in the middle of a sinkhole. Its torch was hidden from view, but the glare off the sides of the hole put the ship in
sharp silhouette, turned its ultradrive spines into feathery white arcs. A giant moth with glowing wings … and just out of reach.

  Note 510

  If their suits held, they could make it to the edge of the hole. Then what? The spines kept the ship from getting closer than a hundred meters. An able-bodied (and crazy) human might try to grab a spine and crawl down it.

  But Skroderiders had their own brand of insanity: Just as the light — the reflected light — became too much to bear … the torch winked out. The OOB fell through the hole. This didn’t stop the Riders’ advance. “Faster!” said Blueshell. And now she guessed what they planned. Quickly for such an awkward jumble of limbs and wheels, they moved up to the edge of the darkened hole. Ravna felt the dirt giving way beneath her feet, and then they were falling.

  The Decks were hundreds — in places, thousands — of meters thick. They fell past them now, past dim eerie flickers of internal destruction.

  Note 511

  Then they were through, still falling. For a moment the feeling of wild panic was gone. After all this was simply free fall, a commonplace, and a damnsight more peaceful than the disintegrating Docks. Now it was easy to hold onto the Riders and Pham Nuwen, and even their commensal atmosphere seemed a little thicker than before. There was something to be said for hard vacuum and free fall. Except for an occasional rogue agrav, everything was coming down at the same acceleration, ruins peacefully settling. And four or five minutes from now they would hit Groundside’s atmosphere, still falling almost straight downwards…. Entry velocity only three or four kilometers per second. Would they burn up? Maybe. Flashes pricked bright above the cloud-decks.

  The junk around them was mostly dark, just shadows against the sky show above. But the wreckage directly below was large and regular … the OOB, bow on! The ship was falling with them. Every few seconds a trim jet fired, a faint reddish glow. The ship was closing with them. If it had a nose hatch, they would land right on it.

  Its docking lights flicked on, bright upon them. Ten meters separation. Five. There was a hatch, and open! She could see a very ordinary airlock within….