A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

  “Okay. So suppose Jefri is for real. We have this eight-year- old kid down on the Tines’ world. He’s telling us what he considers to be the truth. I’m saying it looks like someone is lying to him. Maybe we can trust what he sees with his own eyes. He says these creatures aren’t sapient except in groups of five or so. Okay. We’ll believe that.” Pham rolled his eyes. Apparently his reading had shown how rare group intelligences were this side of the Transcend. “The kid says they didn’t see anything but small towns from space, and that everything on the ground is medieval. Okay, we’ll buy that. But. What are the chances that this race is smart enough to do PDE’s in their heads, and do them from just the implications in your message?”

  “Well, there have been some humans that smart.” She could name one case in Nyjoran history, another couple from Old Earth. If such abilities were common among the packs, they were smarter than any natural race she had heard of. “So this isn’t first-time medievalism?”

  “Right. I bet this is some colony fallen on hard times — like your Nyjora and my Canberra, except that they have the good luck of being in the Beyond. These dog packs have a working computer somewhere. Maybe it’s under control of their priest class; maybe they don’t have much else. But they’re holding out on us.”

  “But why? We’d be helping them in any case. And Jefri has told us how this group saved him.”

  Pham started to smile again, the old supercilious smile. Then he sobered. He was really trying to break that habit. “You’ve been on a dozen different worlds, Ravna. And I know you’ve read about thousands more, at least in survey. You probably know of varieties of medievalism I’ve never guessed. But remember, I’ve actually been there…. I think.” The last was a nervous mutter.

  “I’ve read about the Age of Princesses,” Ravna said mildly.

  “Yes…. and I’m sorry for belittling that. In any medieval politics, the blade and the thought are closely connected. But they become much more closely bound for someone who’s lived through it. Look, even if we believe everything that Jefri says he has seen, this Hidden Island Kingdom is a sinister thing.”

  “You mean the names?”

  Note 780

  “Like Flensers, Steel, Tines? Harsh names aren’t necessarily meaningful.” Pham laughed. “I mean, when I was eight years old, one of my titles was already ‘Lord Master Disemboweler’.” He saw the look on Ravna’s face and hurriedly added, “And at that age, I hadn’t even witnessed more than a couple of executions! No, the names are only a small part of it. I’m thinking of the kid’s description of the castle — which seems to be close by the ship — and this ambush he thinks he was rescued from. It doesn’t add up. You asked ‘what could they gain from betraying us’. I can see that question from their point of view. If they are a fallen colony, they have a clear idea what they’ve lost. They probably have some remnant technology, and are paranoid as hell. If I were them, I’d seriously consider ambushing the rescuers if those rescuers seemed weak or careless. And even if we come on strong … look at the questions Jefri asks for Steel. The guy is fishing, trying to figure out what we really value: the refugee ship, Jefri and the coldsleepers, or something on the ship. By the time we arrive, Steel will probably have wiped the local opposition — thanks to us. My guess is we’re in for some heavy blackmail when we get to Tines’ world.”

  I thought we were talking about the good news. Ravna paged back through recent messages. Pham was right. The boy was telling the truth as he knew it, but…. “I don’t see how we can play things any differently. If we don’t help Steel against the Woodcarvers—”

  “Yeah. We don’t know enough to do much else. Whatever else is true, the Woodcarvers seem a valid threat to Jefri and the ship. I’m just saying we should be thinking about all the possibilities. One thing we absolutely mustn’t do is show interest in Countermeasure. If the locals know how desperate we are for that, we don’t have a chance.

  Note 781

  “And it may be time to start planting a few lies of our own. Steel’s been talking about building a landing place for us — within his castle. There’s no way OOB could fit, but I think we should play along, tell Jefri that we can separate from our ultradrive, something like his container ship. Let Steel concentrate on building harmless traps….”

  He hummed one of his strange little “marching” tunes. “About the radio thing: why don’t we compliment the Tines real casually for improving our design. I wonder what they’d say?”

  Note 782

  Pham Nuwen got his answer less than three days later. Jefri Olsndot said that he had done the optimization. So if you believed the kid, there was no evidence for hidden computers. Pham was not at all convinced: “So just by coincidence, we have Isaac Newton on the other end of the line?” Ravna didn’t argue the point. It was an enormous bit of luck, yet…. She went over the earlier messages. In language and general knowledge, the boy seemed very ordinary for his age. But occasionally there were situations involving mathematical insight — not formal, taught math — where Jefri said striking things. Some of those conversations had been under fine conditions, with turnaround times of less than a minute. It all seemed too consistent to be the lie Pham Nuwen thought.

  Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.

  * * *

  Note 783

  There was always something: problems with the Tines’ developments, fears that the murderous Woodcarvers might attack Mr. Steel, worries about the steadily degrading drive spines and Zone turbulence that slowed OOB‘s progress even further. Life was by turns and at once frustrating, boring, frightening. And yet …

  Note 784

  One night about four months into the flight, Ravna woke in the cabin she had come to share with Pham. Maybe she had been dreaming, but she couldn’t remember anything except that it had been no nightmare. There was no special noise in the room, nothing to wake her. Beside her, Pham was sleeping soundly in their hammock net. She eased her arm down his back, drawing him gently toward her. His breathing changed; he mumbled something placid and unintelligible. In Ravna’s opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone … that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring and effortless.

  Ravna looked around the dimly-lit cabin, trying to imagine what had woken her. Maybe it had just been the problems of the day — Powers knew there had been enough of those. She nestled her face against Pham’s shoulder. Yes, always problems, but … in a way she more content than she had been in years. Sure there were problems. Poor Jefri’s situation. All the people lost at Straum and Relay. But she had three friends, and a love. Alone in a tiny ship bound for the Bottom, she was less lonely than she’d been since leaving Sjandra Kei. More than ever in her life, maybe she could do something to help with the problems.

  And then she guessed, part in sadness, part in joy, that years from now she might look back on these months as goldenly happy.

  Chapter 26

  Note 785

  And finally, almost five months out, it was clear there was no hope of going on without repairing the drive spines. The OOB was suddenly doing only a quarter of a light-year per hour in a volume that tested good for two. And things were getting worse. They would have no trouble making it to Harmonious Repose, but beyond that…

  Note 786

  Harmonious Repose. An ugly name, thought Ravna. Pham’s “light- hearted” translation was worse: Rest In Peace. In the Beyond, almost everything habitable was in use. Civilizations were transient and races faded … but there were always new people moving up from Below. The result was most often patchwork, polyspecific systems. Young races just up from the Slowness lived uneasily with the remnants of older peoples. According to the ship’s library, RIP had been in the Beyond for a long time. It had been continuously inhabited for at least two hundred million years, time for ten thousand species to call it home. The most recent notes showed better than one hundred racial terranes. Even
the youngest was the residue of a dozen emigrations. The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.

  Note 787

  So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they’d be able to listen to the News the whole way in.

  Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious, hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users. Too bad we can’t follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible methods of payment.

  Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in:

  Note 788

  Note 789

  Crypto: 0

  Syntax: 43

  As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc

  Note 790

  Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units

  From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of existence before the Fall of the Realm.]

  Subject: Call to action

  Distribution:

  Threat of the Blight

  War Trackers Interest Group

  Homo Sapiens Interest Group

  Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay

  Note 791

  Key phrases: Action, not talk

  Text of message:

  Note 792

  Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will need support services including free Net time.

  In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of victory — or wait, and be destroyed.

  Death to vermin.

  There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about who Death to Vermin (aka the “Alliance for the Defense”) had in mind. There were also rumors of military movement. This wasn’t making the splash the fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups. Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. “Well, they’re still making big noises,” she tried for a light tone, but it didn’t come out that way.

  Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. “Quite true. And real killers generally don’t advertise beforehand.” But there was more sympathy than conviction in his voice. “We still don’t know that this is more than a single loud-mouth. There’s no definite word of ship movements. What can they do after all?”

  Ravna pushed herself up from the table. “Not much, I hope. There are hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they’ve have taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began…. By the Powers, I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe.” It had been more than two years since she’d seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than she realized. Now….

  On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. “I do fear for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand.”

  Note 793

  Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. “Yeah. We’re not a ghetto there.” Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei would be okay. “Bluffers. Well it’s not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.” She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. “But one thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to look like anything human.”

  Note 794

  * * *

  And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the “talking”. Ravna and the Riders went through all the ship’s exterior programs, weeding out human nuances that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded? Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if necessary.

  Pham Nuwen checked what they did — and found more than one slip-up. For a barbarian programmer, he wasn’t bad. But then they were rapidly reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn’t that much more sophisticated than what he had known.

  Note 795

  Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed of nearly superhuman competence. “The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe built in a factory,” was how Pham Nuwen put it.

  Note 796

  * * *

  Note 797

  RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and “Saint(?) Rihndell’s Repair Harbor”. (Pham: “If you’re a ‘saint’, you gotta be honest, right?”)

  Note 798

  Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers from RIP’s single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet. The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet. Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides, hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects —structures? — sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt, and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred kilometers across … but there appeared to be thousands of them.

  Note 799

  At “Saint Rihndell’s” direction they brought the ship down to the ring plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. “Just like old, old times,” Pham Nuwen said.

  In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of icy froth — gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In the plane of the rings, they couldn’t see more than a few hundred meters. The debris blocked further views. And it wasn’t all loose. Greenstalk pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. “Looks like a single structure,” she said.

  Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the “frothy snowballs” sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks long…. The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with images from their approach
, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time Nyjoran railway.

  Note 800

  Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc. The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers, they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths were occupied.

  Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell’s business specs. “Hmm. Hm. Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy.” He angled some fronds back at the ships in the exterior view.

  Pham: “Maybe he’s running a junkyard.”

  Note 801

  * * *

  Note 802

  Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with “Saint Rihndell”.

  “Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would remember the type even if I’d never ridden a Skrode. But our business here is not like anything we’ve done before.”

  Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic stuff that protected what it covered.

  This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, “Certainly, there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don’t use hard business sense we’ll get nothing here!” He checked the various sensors strung across his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. “Do you want me to move any of the cameras? Do they all have a clear view?” Saint Rihndell was a miser when it came to renting bandwidth —or maybe it was simply cautious.