Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  “Huui!” said Glimfrelle. “Bandwidth just dropped through the floor.” There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the Out of Band. Given communications problems, the ship’s processors just switched to low-rate coding.

  “Hello, Out of Band. We’ve got problems on this channel now. Suggest we sign off.”

  The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it:

  Yes. It is more than a communicati

  Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. “Zip. Zero,” he said. “No detectable signal.”

  Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. “This is a lot more than a communications problem. Our computers haven’t been able to commit on an ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds.” They had been doing five jumps a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now…

  Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. “Hei—so welcome to the Slow Zone.”

  The Slow Zone. Ravna Bergsndot looked across the deck of the Out of Band II. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always had a vision of the Slowness as a stifling darkness lit at best by torches, the domain of cretins and mechanical calculators. In fact, things didn’t look much different from before. The ceilings and walls glowed just as before. The stars still shone through the windows (only now, it might be a very long time before any of them moved).

  It was on the OOB‘s other displays that the change was most obvious. The ultratrace tank blinked monotonously, a red legend displaying elapsed time since the last update. Navigation windows were filled with output from the diagnostics exercising the drive processors. An audible message in Triskweline was repeating over and over, “Warning. Transition to Slowness detected. Execute back jump at once! Warning. Transition to Slowness detected. Execute…”

  “Turn that off!” Ravna grabbed a saddle and strapped herself down. She was actually feeling dizzy, though that could only be (a very natural) panic. “Some bottom lugger this is. We run right into the Slow Zone, and all it can do is spout warnings after the fact!”

  Greenstalk drifted closer, “tiptoeing” off the ceiling with her tendrils. “Even bottom luggers can’t avoid things like this, My Lady Ravna”

  Pham said something at the ship and most of the displays cleared.

  Blueshell: “Even a huge Zone storm doesn’t normally extend more than a few light-years. We were two hundred light-years above the Zone boundary. What hit us must be a monster surge, the sort of thing you only read about in archives.”

  Small consolation. “We knew something like this could happen,” Pham said. “Things have been getting awfully rough the last few weeks.” For a change, he didn’t seem too upset.

  “Yes,” she said. “We expected a slowing maybe, but not The Slowness.”We are trapped.“Where’s the nearest habitable system? Ten light-years? Fifty?” The vision of darkness had a new reality, and the starscape beyond the ship’s walls was no longer a friendly, steadying thing. Surrounded by unending nothingness, moving at some vanishing fraction of the speed of light … entombed. All the courage of Kjet Svensndot and his fleet, for nothing. Jefri Olsndot, forever unrescued.

  Pham’s hand touched her shoulder, the first touch in … days? “We can still make it to the Tines’ world. This is a bottom lugger, remember? We are not trapped. Hell, the ramscoop on this buggy is better than anything I ever had in the Qeng Ho. And I thought I was the freest man in the universe back then.”

  Decades of travel time, mostly in coldsleep. Such had been the world of the Qeng Ho, the world of Pham’s memories. Ravna let out a shuddering breath that ended in weak laughter. For Pham, the terrible pressure was abated, at least temporarily. He could be human.

  “What’s so funny?” said Pham.

  She shook her head. “All of us. Never mind.” She took a couple of slow breaths. “Okay. I think I can make rational conversation. So the Zone has surged. Something that normally takes a thousand years—even in a storm—to move a single light-year, has suddenly shifted two hundred. Hunh! There’ll be people a million years from now reading about this in the archives. I’m not sure I want the honor… We knew there was a storm, but I never expected to be drowned,” buried light-years deep beneath the sea.

  “The sea storm analogy is not perfect,” said Blueshell. The Skroderider was still on the far side of the deck, where he had retreated after questioning the Sjandra Kei captain. He still looked upset, though he was back to sounding precise and picky. Blueshell was studying a nav display, evidently a recording from right before the surge. He dumped the picture to a display flat and rolled slowly across the ceiling toward them. Greenstalk’s fronds brushed him gently as he passed.

  He sailed the display flat into Ravna’s hands, and continued in a lecturing tone. “Even in a sea storm, the water’s surface is never as roiled as in a big interface disturbance. The most recent News reports showed it as a fractal surface with dimension close to three… Like foam and spray.” Even he could not avoid the storm analogy. The starscapes hung serene beyond crystal walls, and the loudest sound was a faint breeze from the ship’s ventilators. Yet they had been swallowed in a maelstrom. Blueshell waved a frond at the display flat. “We could be back in the Beyond in a few hours.”

  “What?”

  “See. The plane of the display is determined by the positions of the supposed Sjandra Kei command vessel, the outflying craft that we contacted directly, and ourselves.” The three formed a narrow triangle, the Limmende and Svensndot vertices close together. “I’ve marked the times that contact was lost with the others. Notice: the link to Commercial Security HQ went down 150 seconds before we were hit. From the incoming signal and its requests for protocol changes, I believe that both we and the outflyer were enveloped and at about the same time.”

  Pham nodded. “Yeah. The most distant sites losing contact last. That must mean the surge moved in from the side.”

  “Exactly!” From his perch on the ceiling, Blueshell reached to tap the display. “The three ships were like probes in the standard Zone mapping technique. Replaying the trace displays will no doubt confirm the conclusion.”

  Ravna looked at the plot. The long point of the triangle—tipped by the OOB—pointed almost directly toward the heart of the galaxy. “It must have been a huge, clifflike thing perpendicular to the rest of the surface.”

  “A monster wave sweeping sideways!” said Greenstalk. “And that’s also why it won’t last long.”

  “Yes. It’s the radial changes that are most often long term. This thing must have a trailing edge. We should pass through it in a few hours—and back into the Beyond.”

  So there was still a race to be won or lost.

  The first hours were strange. “A few hours,” had been Blueshell’s estimate of when they would be back in the Beyond. They hung around the bridge, alternately watching the clock and stewing about the strange conversations just completed. Pham was building himself back to trigger tension. Any time now, they would be back in the Beyond. What to do then? If only a few ships were perverted, perhaps Svensndot could still coordinate an attack. Would that do any good? Pham played the ultratrace recordings over and over, studying every detectable ship in all the fleets. “But when we get out, when we get out … I’ll know what to do. Not why I must do it, but what.” And he couldn’t explain more.

  Any time now… There was scarcely any reason to do much about resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.

  But after eight hours: “It really could be longer, even a day.” They had been scrounging around in the historical literature. “Maybe we should do a little housekeeping.” The Out of Band II had been designed for both the Beyond and the Slowness, but that second environment was regarded as an unlikely, emergency one. There were special-purpose processors for the Slow Zone, but they hadn’t come up automatically. With Blueshell’s advice, Pham took the high-performance automation off-line; that wasn’t too difficult, except for a couple of voice-actuated independents that were no longer bright enough to understand the q
uitting commands.

  Using the new automation gave Ravna a chill that, in a subtle way, was almost as frightening as the original loss of the ultradrive. Her image of the Slowness as darkness and torchlight—that was just nightmare fantasy. On the other hand, the Slowness as the domain of cretins and mechanical calculators, there was something to that. The OOB‘s performance had degraded steadily during their voyage to the Bottom, but now … Gone were the voice-driven graphics generators; they were just a bit too complex to be supported by the new OOB, at least in full interpretive mode. Gone were the intelligent context analyzers that made the ship’s library almost as accessible as one’s own memories. Eventually, Ravna even turned off the art and music units; without mood and context response, they seemed so wooden … constant reminders that there were no brains behind them. Even the simplest things were corrupted. Take voice and gesture controls: They no longer responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang. It took a certain discipline to use them effectively. (Pham actually seemed to like this. It reminded him of the Qeng Ho.)

  Twenty hours. Fifty. Everyone was still telling each other there was nothing to worry about. But now Blueshell said that talk of “hours” had been unrealistic. Considering the height of the “tsunami” (at least two hundred light-years), it would likely be several hundred light-years across—that in keeping with the scaling laws of historical precedent. There was only one trouble with this reasoning: they were beyond all precedent. For the most part, zone boundaries followed galactic mean density. There was virtually no change from year to year, just the aeons’ long shrinkage that might someday—after the death of all but the smallest stars—expose the galactic core to the Beyond. At any given time, perhaps one billionth of that boundary might qualify as being in a “storm state”. In an ordinary storm, the surface might move in or out a light-year in a decade or so. Such storms were common enough to affect the fortunes of many worlds every year.

  Much rarer—perhaps once in a hundred thousand years in the whole galaxy—there would be a storm where the boundary became seriously distorted, and where surges might move at a high multiple of light speed. These were the transverse surges that Pham and Blueshell made their scale estimates from. The fastest moved at about a light-year per second, across a distance of less than three lights; the largest were thirty light-years high and moved at scarcely a light-year per day.

  So what was known of monsters like the thing that had engulfed them? Not much. Third-hand stories in the Ship’s library told of surges perhaps as big as theirs, but the quoted dimensions and propagation rates were not clear. Stories more than a hundred million years old are hard to trust; there are scarcely any intermediate languages. (And even if there were, it wouldn’t have helped. The new, dumb version of the OOB absolutely could not do mechanical translation of natural languages. Dredging the library was pointless.)

  When Ravna complained about this to Pham, he said, “Things could be worse. What was the Ur-Partition really?”

  Five billion years ago. “No one’s sure.”

  Pham jerked a thumb at his library display. “Some people think it was a ‘super supersurge’, you know. Something so big it swallowed the races that might have recorded it. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all—no one’s around to write horror stories.”

  Great.

  “I’m sorry, Ravna. Honestly, if we’re in anything like most past disasters, we’ll come out of it in another day or two. The best thing is to plan for things that way. This is like a ‘time-out’ in the battle. Take advantage of it to have a little peace. Figure out how to get the unperverted parts of Commercial Security to help us.”

  “…Yeah.” Depending on the shape of the surge’s trailing edge the OOB might have lost a good part of its lead… But I’ll bet the Alliance fleet is completely panicked by all this. Such opportunists would likely run for safety as soon as they’re back in the Beyond.

  The advice kept her busy for another twenty hours, fighting with the half-witted things that claimed to be strategy planners on the new version of the OOB. Even if the surge passed right this instant, it might be too late. There were players in this game for whom the surge was not a time-out: Jefri Olsndot and his Tinish allies. It had been seventy hours now since their last contact; Ravna had missed three comm sessions with them. If she were panicked, what must be like for Jefri? Even if Steel could hold off his enemies, time—and trust—would be running out at Tines’ world.

  One hundred hours into the surge, Ravna noticed that Blueshell and Pham were doing power tests on the OOB‘s ramscoop drive… Some time-outs last forever.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The summer hot spell broke for a time; in fact, it was almost chilly. There was still the smoke and the air was still dry, but the winds seemed less driven. Inside their cubby aboard the ship, Amdijefri weren’t taking much notice of the nice weather.

  “They’ve been slow in answering before,” said Amdi. “She’s explained how the ultrawave—”

  “Ravna’s never been this late!” Not since the winter, anyway. Jefri’s tone hovered between fear and petulance. In fact, there was supposed to be a transmission in the middle of the night, technical data for them to pass on to Mr. Steel. It hadn’t arrived by this morning, and now Ravna had also missed their afternoon session, the time when normally they could just chat for a bit.

  The two children reviewed all the comm settings. The previous fall, they had laboriously copied those and the first level diagnostics. It all looked the same now … except for something called “carrier detect”. If only they had a dataset, they might have looked up what that meant.

  They had even very carefully reset some of the comm parameters … then nervously set them back when nothing happened. Maybe they hadn’t given the changes enough of a chance to work. Maybe now they had really messed something up.

  They stayed in the command cubby all through the afternoon, their minds cycling trough fear and boredom and frustration. After four hours, boredom had at least a temporary victory. Jefri was napping uneasily in his father’s hammock with two of Amdi curled up in his arms.

  Amdi poked idly around the room, looked at the rocket controls. No … not even his self-confidence was up to playing with those. Another of him jerked at the wall quilting. He could always watch the fungus grow for a while. Things were that slow.

  Actually, the gray stuff had spread a lot further than the last time he looked. Behind the quilt, it was quite thick. He sent a chain of himself squirreling back between the wall and the fabric. It was dark, but some light spilled through the gap at the ceiling. In most places the mold was scarcely an inch thick, but back here it was five or six—wow. Just above his exploring nose, a huge lump of it grew from the wall. This was as big as some of the ornamental moss that decorated castle meeting halls. Slender gray filaments grew down from the fungus. He almost called out to Jefri, but the two of him in the hammock were so comfortable.

  He brought a couple more heads close to the strangeness. The wall behind it looked a little odd, too … as though part of its substance had been taken by the mold. And the gray itself: like smoke—he felt the filaments with his nose. They were solid, dry. His nose tickled. Amdi froze in shocked surprise. Watching himself from behind, he saw that two of the filaments had actually passed through his member’s head! And yet there was no pain, just that tickling feeling.

  “What—what?” Jefri had been jostled into wakefulness, as Amdi tensed around him.

  “I found something really strange, behind the quilts. I touched this big hunk of fungus and—”

  As he spoke, Amdi gently backed away from thing on the wall. The touch didn’t hurt, but it made him more nervous than curious. He felt the filaments sliding slowly out.

  “I told you, we aren’t supposed to play with that stuff. It’s dirty. The only good thing is, it doesn’t smell.” Jefri was out of the hammock. He stepped across the cubby and lifted the quilting. Amdi’s tip member lost its balance and jerked away from the fu
ngus. There was a snapping sound, and a sharp pain in his lip.

  “Geez, that thing is big!” Then, hearing Amdi’s pain whistle, “You okay?”

  Amdi backed away from the wall. “I think so.” The tip of one last filament was still stuck in his lip. It didn’t hurt as much as the nettles he’d sampled a few days earlier. Amdijefri looked over the wound. What was left of the smoky spine seemed hard and brittle. Jefri’s fingers gently worked it free. Then the two of them turned to wonder at the thing in the wall.

  “It really has spread. Looks like it’s hurt the wall, too.”

  Amdi dabbed at his bloodied muzzle. “Yeah. I see why your folks told you to stay away from it.”

  “Maybe we should have Mr. Steel scrub it all out.”

  The two spent half an hour crawling around behind all the quilting. The grayness had spread far, but there was only the one marvelous flowering. They came back to stare at it, even sticking articles of clothing into the wisps. Neither risked fingers or noses on further contact.

  Staring at the fungus on the wall was by far the most exciting thing that happened that afternoon; there was no message from the OOB.

  The next day the hot weather was back.

  Two more days passed … and still there was no word from Ravna.

  Lord Steel paced the walls atop Starship Hill. It was near the middle of the night, and the sun hung about fifteen degrees above the northern horizon. Sweat filmed his fur; this was the warmest summer in ten years. The drywind was into its thirtieth dayaround. It was no longer a welcome break in the chill of the northland. The crops were dying in the fields. Smoke from fjord fires was visible as brownish haze both north and south of the castle. At first the reddish color had been a novelty, a welcome change from the unending blue of sky and distance, and the whitish haze of the sea fogs. Only at first. When fire struck East Streamsdell, the entire sky had been dipped in red. Ash had rained all the dayaround, and the only smell had been that of burning. Some said it was worse than the filthy air of the southern cities.