Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  It was the disaster they thought could not happen, and now it had. In one minute she had lost everything she grew up with, and was suddenly alone in the universe. For me, that happened long ago, the thought came strangely dispassionate. He hooked a foot into the deck and gently rocked Ravna back and forth, trying to comfort her.

  The sounds of grief gradually quieted, though he could still feel her sobs through his chest. She didn’t raise her face from the tear-soaked place on his shirt. Pham looked over her head at Blueshell and Greenstalk. Their fronds looked strange … almost wilted.

  “Look, I want to take Ravna away for a bit. Learn what you can, and I’ll be back.”

  “Yes, Sir Pham.” And they seemed to droop even more.

  It was an hour before Pham returned to the command deck. When he did, he found the Riders deep in rattling conference with OOB. All the windows were filled with flickering strangeness. Here and there Pham recognized a pattern or a printed legend, enough to guess that he was seeing ordinary ship displays, but optimised to Rider senses.

  Blueshell noticed him first; he rolled abruptly toward him and his voder voice came out a little squeaky. “Is she all right?”

  Pham gave a little nod. “She’s sleeping now.”Sedated, and with the ship watching her in case I’ve misjudged her.“Look, she’ll be okay. She’s been hit hard … but she’s the toughest one of us all.”

  Greenstalk’s fronds rattled a smile. “I have often thought that.”

  Blueshell was motionless for an instant. Then, “Well, to business, to business.” He said something to the ship, and the windows reformatted in the compromise usable by both humans and Riders. “We’ve learned a lot while you were gone. Saint Rihndell indeed has something to fear. The Aprahanti ships are a small fragment of the Death to Vermin extermination fleets. These are stragglers still on their way to Sjandra Kei!”

  All dressed up for a massacre, and no place to go.“So now they want some action of their own.”

  “Yes. Apparently Sjandra Kei put up some resistance and there were some escapes. The commander of this fleetlet thinks he can intercept some of these—if he can get prompt repairs.”

  “What kind of extortion is really possible? Could these twenty ships destroy RIP?”

  “No. It’s the reputation of the greater force these ships are part of—and the great killing at Sjandra Kei. So Saint Rihndell is very timid with them, and what they need for repairs is the same class of regrowth agent that we need. We really are in competition with them for Rihndell’s business.” Blueshell’s fronds slapped together, the sort of “go get’em” enthusiasm he displayed when a hot deal was remembered. “But it turns out we have something Saint Rihndell really, really wants, something he’ll even risk tricking the Aprahanti to get.” He paused dramatically.

  Pham thought back over the things they had offered the RIPers. Lord, not the low zone ultrawave gear.“Okay, I’ll bite. What do we have to give’em?”

  “A set of flamed trellises! Hah hah.”

  “Huh?” Pham remembered the name from the list of odds and ends the Skroderiders had scrounged up. “What’s a ‘flamed trellis’?”

  Blueshell poked a frond into his satchel and extended something stubby and black to Pham: an irregular solid, about forty centimeters by fifteen, smooth to the touch. For all its size, it didn’t mass more than a couple of grams. An artfully smoothed … cinder. Pham’s curiosity triumphed over greater concerns: “But what’s it good for?”

  Blueshell dithered. After a moment, Greenstalk said a little shyly, “There are theories. It’s pure carbon, a fractal polymer. We know it’s very common in Transcendent cargoes. We think it’s used as packing material for some kinds of sentient property.”

  “Or perhaps the excrement of such property,” Blueshell buzz-muttered. “Ah, but that’s not important. What is, is that occasional races in the Middle Beyond prize them. And why that? Again, we don’t know. Saint Rihndell’s folk are certainly not the final user. The Tusk-legs are far too sensible to be ordinary trellis customers. So. We have three hundred of these wonderful things … more than enough to overcome Saint Rihndell’s fears of the Aprahanti.”

  While Pham had been away with Ravna, Saint Rihndell had come up with a plan. Applying the regrowth agent would be too obvious in the same harbor with the Aprahanti ships. Besides, the chief Butterfly had demanded the OOB move out. Saint Rihndell had a small harbor about sixteen million klicks around the RIP system. The move was even plausible, for it happened that there was a Skroderider terrane in the Harmonious Repose system—and currently it was just a few hundred kilometers from Rihndell’s second harbor. They would rendezvous with the tusk-legs, exchanging repairs for two hundred seventeen flamed trellises. And if the trellises were perfectly matched, Rihndell promised to throw in an agrav refit. After the Fall of Relay, that would be very welcome… Hunh. Ol’ Blueshell just never stopped wheeling and dealing.

  The OOB slipped free of its moorings and carefully drifted up from the ring plane. Tiptoe-ing out. Pham kept a close watch on the EM and ultrawave windows. But there were no target-locking emanations from the Aprahanti vessels, nothing more than casual radar contact. No one followed. Little OOB and its “potted plants” were beneath the notice of the great warriors.

  One thousand meters above the ring plane. Three. The Skroderiders’ chatter—both with Pham and between themselves—dwindled to naught. Their stalks and fronds angled so the sensing surfaces looked out in all directions. The sun and its power cloud was a blaze of light on one side of the deck. They were above the rings, but still so close… It was like standing at sunset on a beach of colored sands … that stretched to an infinite horizon. The Skroderiders stared into it, their fronds gently swaying.

  Twenty kilometers above the rings. One thousand. They lit the OOB‘s main torch and accelerated across the system. The Skroderiders came slowly out of their trance. Once they arrived at the second harbor, the regrowth would take about five hours—assuming Rihndell’s agent had not deteriorated; the Saint claimed it was recently imported from the Top, and undiluted.

  “Okay, so when do we deliver the trellises?”

  “On completion of the repairs. We can’t depart until Saint Rihndell—or his customers—are satisfied that all the pieces are genuine.”

  Pham drummed his fingers on the comm console. This operation brought back a lot of memories, some of them hair-raising. “So they get the goods while we’re still in the middle of RIP. I don’t like it.”

  “See here, Sir Pham. Your experience with star trading was in the Slow Zone, where exchanges were separated by decades or centuries of travel time. I admire you for that, more than I can say—but it gives you a twisted view of things. Up here in the Beyond, the notion of return business is important. We know very little of Saint Rihndell’s inner motivation, but we do know his repair business has existed for at least forty years. Sharp dealing we can expect from him, but if he robbed or murdered very many, trader groups would know, and his little business would starve.”

  “Hmf.” No point in arguing it right now, but Pham guessed that this situation was special. Rihndell—and the RIPers in general—had Death to Vermin sitting on their doorstep, and stories of major chaos coming from the direction of Sjandra Kei. With that background they might just lose their courage once they had the trellises. Some precautions were in order. He drifted off to the ship’s machine shop.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ravna came to the cargo deck as Blueshell and Greenstalk were preparing the trellises for delivery. She moved hesitantly, pushing awkardly from point to point. There were dark rings, almost bruises, beneath her eyes. She returned Pham’s hug almost tentatively, but didn’t let go. “I want to help. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  The Skroderiders left their trellises and rolled over. Blueshell ran a frond gently across Ravna’s arm, “Nothing for you to do now, my lady Ravna. We have everything well, ah, in hand. We’ll be back in less than an hour, and then we can be rid of here.
”

  But they let her check their cameras and the cargo strap-downs. Pham drifted close by her as she inspected the trellises. The twisted carbon blocks looked stranger than the one alone had. Properly stacked, they fit perfectly. More than a meter across, the stack looked like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle carved from coal. Counting a separate bag of loose spares, they totaled less than half a kilogram. Huh. Damn things should be flammable as hell. Pham resolved to play with the remaining hundred odd trellises after they were safely back in deep space.

  Then the Skroderiders were through the cargo lock with their delivery, and they could only follow along on their cameras.

  This secondary harbor was not really part of the tusk-leg race’s terrane. The inside of the arc was far different from what they had seen on the Skroderiders’ first trip. There were no exterior views. Cramped passages wound between irregular walls pocked with dark holes. Insects flew everywhere, often covering parts of the camera balls. To Pham, the place looked filthy. There was no evidence of the terrane’s owners—unless they were the pallid worms that sometimes stuck a featureless head(?) up from a burrow hole. Over his voice link, Blueshell opined that these were very ancient tenants of the RIP system. After a million years, and a hundred transcendent emigrations, the residue might still be sentient, but stranger than anything evolved in the Slow Zone. Such a people would be protected from physical extinction by ancient automation, but they would also be inward turning, totally cautious, absorbed in concerns that were inane by any outside standard. It was the type that most often lusted after trellis work.

  Pham tried to keep an eye on everything. The Riders had to travel almost four kilometers from the harbor lock to reach the place where the trellises would be “validated”. Pham counted two exterior locks along the way, and nothing that looked especially threatening—but then how would he know what “threatening” looked like here? He had the OOB mount an exterior watch. A large shepherd satellite floated on the outer side of the ring, but there were no other ships in this harbor. The EM and ultra-environment seemed placid, and what could be seen on the local net did not make the ship’s defenses suspicious.

  Pham looked up from the reports. Ravna had drifted across the deck to the outside view. The repair work was visible, though not spectacular. A pale greenish aura hung around the damaged spines. It was scarcely brighter than the glow you often see on ship hulls in low planetary orbit. She turned and said softly, “Is it really getting fixed?”

  “As far as we can—I mean yes.” Ship’s automation was monitoring the regrowth, but they wouldn’t know for sure till they tried to fly with it.

  Pham was never sure why Rihndell had the Skroderiders pass through the wormheads’ terrane; maybe, if the creatures were the ultimate trellis users, they wanted a look at the sellers. Or maybe it had some connection with the treachery that ultimately followed. In any case the Riders were soon out of it, and into a polyspecific concourse as crowded as any low-tech bazaar.

  Pham’s jaw sagged. Everywhere he looked there was a different class of sophont. Intelligent life is a rare development in the universe; in all his life in the Slow Zone, he had known three nonhuman races. But the universe is a big place, and with ultradrive it was easy to find other life. The Beyond collected the detritus of countless migrations, an accumulation that finally made civilization ubiquitous. For a moment he lost track of his surveillance programs and his general suspicions, drowned in the wonder of it. Ten species? Twelve? Individuals brushed familiarly by one another. Even Relay had not been like this. But then Harmonious Repose was a civilization lost in stagnation. These races had been part of the RIP complex for thousands of years. The ones that could interact had long since learned to do so.

  And nowhere did he see butterfly wings on creatures with large, compassionate eyes.

  He heard a small sound of surprise from the far side of the deck. Ravna was standing close by a window that looked out from one of Greenstalk’s side cameras. “What is it, Rav?”

  “Skroderiders. See?” She pointed into the mob and zoomed the view. For a moment the images towered over her. Through the passing chaos he had a glimpse of hull forms and graceful fronds. Except for cosmetic stripes and tassles, they looked very familiar indeed.

  “Yeah, there’s a small colony of them hereabouts.” He opened the channel to Greenstalk and told her about the sighting.

  “I know. We … smelled them. Sigh. I wish we had time to visit them after this. Finding friends in far places … always nice.” She helped Blueshell push the trellises around a balloon acquarium. They could see Rihndell’s people just ahead. Six tusk-legs sat on the wall around what might be test equipment.

  Blueshell and Greenstalk pushed their ball of frothy carbon into the group. The scrimshawed one leaned close to the pile and reached out to fondle the pieces with its tiny arms. One after another the trellises were placed in the tester. Blueshell moved in close to watch, and Pham set the main windows to look through his cameras. Twenty seconds passed. Rihndell’s Trisk interpreter said, “First seven test true, make an interlocked septet.”

  Only then did Pham realize he had been holding his breath. The next three “septets” passed, too. Another sixty seconds. He glanced at the ship’s repair status. OOB considered the job done but for sign-off commit from the local net. Another few minutes and we can kiss this place goodbye!

  But there are always problems. Saint Rihndell bitched about the twelfth and fifteenth sets. Blueshell argued at length, grudgingly produced replacement pieces from his bag of spares. Pham couldn’t tell if the Skroderider was debating for the fun of it, or if he really was short on good replacements.

  Twenty-five sets okayed.

  “Where is Greenstalk going?” said Ravna.

  “What?” Pham called up the view from Greenstalk’s cameras. She was five meters from Blueshell and moving away. He panned wildly about. A local Skroderider was on her left and another floated inverted above her. Its fronds touched hers in apparently amiable conversation. “Greenstalk!” There was no reply.

  “Blueshell! What’s happening?” But that Rider was in gesticulating argument with the tusk-legs. Still another set of trellises had failed their examination. “Blueshell!” After a moment the Rider’s voice came over their private channel. He sounded drifty, the way he often did when he was jammed or overloaded. “Not to bother me now, Sir Pham. I’m down to three perfect replacements. I must persuade these fellows to settle for what they already have.”

  Ravna broke in, “But what about Greenstalk? What’s happening to her?” The cameras had lost sight of each other. Greenstalk and her companions emerged from a dense crowd and floated across the middle of the concourse. They were using gas jets instead of wheels. Someone was in a hurry.

  The seriousness of events finally got through to Blueshell. The view from his skrode turned wildly as he rolled back and forth around Saint Rihndell’s people. There was the rattle of Rider talk and then his voice came back on the inside channel, plaintive and confused. “She’s gone. She’s gone. I must … I have to…” Abruptly he rolled back to the tusk legs and resumed the argument that had just been interrupted. After a couple of seconds his voice came back on the inside channel. “What should I do, Sir Pham? I have a sale here still incomplete, yet my Greenstalk has wandered off.”

  Or been kidnapped.“Get us the sale, Blueshell. Greenstalk will be okay… OOB: Plan B.” He grabbed a headset and pushed off from the console.

  Ravna rose with him. “Where are you going?”

  He grinned. “Out. I thought Saint Rihndell might lose his halo when the crunch came—and I made plans.” She followed him as he glided toward the floor hatch. “Look. I want you to stay on deck. I can only carry so much snoop equipment; I’ll need your coordination.”

  “But—”

  He went through the hatch head first, missing the rest of her objection. She didn’t follow, but a second later her voice was back, in his headset. Some of the tremor was gone from her voice; the o
ld Ravna was there, fighting out from under her other problems. “Okay, I’ll back you … but what can we do?”

  Pham pulled himself hand over hand down the passageway, accelerating to a speed that would have left a lubber caroming off the walls. Ahead loomed the uncompromising wall of the cargo lock. He swatted a hand gently at the wall and flipped head over heels. He dragged his hands precisely against the wall flanges, slowing just enough so the impact with the hatch did not break his ankles. Inside the lock, the ship had his suit already power up.

  “Pham, you can’t go out.” Evidentally she was watching through the lock’s cameras. “They’ll know we’re a human expedition.”

  His head and shoulders were already in the suit’s top shell. He felt the bottom pushing up around him, the seals fastening. “Not necessarily.”And by now it probably doesn’t matter.“There are plenty of two-arm/two-leg critters around, and I’ve glued some camouflage to this outfit.” He cupped his chin in the helmet controls and reset the displays. The armored pressure suit was a very primitive thing compared to the field suits of Relay. Yet the Qeng Ho would have given a starship for this gear. He’d originally put the thing together to impress the Tines, but it’s going to get some early testing.

  He chinned up the outside view, what Ravna was seeing: his figure was unrelieved black, more than two meters tall. The hands were backed with carapace-claws and every edge of his figure was razor sharp and spined. These most recent additions should break the lines of the strictly human form, and hopefully be intimidating as hell.

  Pham cycled the lock and pushed off, into the wormheads’ terrane. Walls of mud stood all around, misty in humid air and swarms of insects.

  Ravna’s voice was in his ear. “I’ve got a low-level query, probably automatic: ‘Why you send third negotiator?’”