by Vernor Vinge
Ravna asked Pilgrim about the problem. As both the Queen’s consort and a parent of some of her recent members, he should have some insight!
“Woodcarver was too shy to say anything about it, Ravna.”
“Huh?” Ravna replied, remembering Woodcarver’s directness in the past. “Why would Woodcarver be shy about complaining to me?”
“Um, I think because she knows she’s wrong to be pissed at you.”
“Y-you two have discussed this?”
“Yup. Basically, she thinks this new meeting place upsets the balance of reputations between the two of you.” He tapped a couple of noses together and looked a little embarrassed. “I know, that’s—well, childish is the word a human might use. I would have warned you, except I was sure that Woodcarver recognized her foolishness in the matter. She’s not usually like this, but she doesn’t have that new puppy entirely in step with the rest of her.” He brightened. “I’ll talk to her. The three of us could get together and—”
“No. I’ll talk to her myself. I should have taken more time explaining the idea to her in the beginning. The New Meeting Place doesn’t replace the Thrones Room. It’s just a informal place where everyone can get closer to the world we’re trying to build.”
So Ravna made an appointment with her co-Queen, in the Thrones Room atop Starship Hill. Even that was a change. Up till now, she’d felt welcome to drop in almost without notice.
She talked to Woodcarver for some time, pointing out what a smash hit the New Meeting Place had become, how it was bringing both the Children and their packs to understanding and eager participation in what Ravna and Woodcarver were trying to accomplish.
“It’s working better than I ever dreamed, Woodcarver. There are packs unrelated to the Children—some of them traditionalists from Woodcarver City—who’ve come to the New Meeting Place. Ultimately, it could be a kind of diplomatic center.”
Most of Woodcarver was curled up around her radio. She nodded courteously at Ravna’s enthusiastic description. “Rather like a capitol, then?”
“Yes—I mean, no, not a center of power. Woodcarver, packs and Children have always had data access at the ship.” Ravna managed a weak laugh. “That’s why so many Tines are great experts on everything human and Beyonder! The New Meeting Place just makes that access easier.”
Woodcarver’s heads gave a gentle shake. “But your starship is the center of power, no matter what you or I might say. When I look out from New Castle’s parapets, I see the telephone mainlines all leading to your starship.”
“But we’re using Oobii for switching and access logic.”
Woodcarver’s voice rolled on: “And, invisibly, your starship manages radio access and relay—without it, our little radios would be a short-range muddle.”
“That’s only until we get past torsion antennas.” Actually, Ravna was hoping Tines World would not have to detour through the era of analog frequency management. Central management should work fine until the Tines had digital signal processing.
“And we Tines have developed almost none of the energy schemes we see described in your archives. Your ship’s beam gun warms our water and our homes.”
Ravna raised her hands. “Without Oobii’s shortcuts it would be decades before we had anything like these services.”
Woodcarver said, “I know that. But nowadays, when I look out and see Oobii with its beam gun so artfully positioned to cover the heartland of the Domain…”
Ravna sat in shocked silence. After the Battle on Starship Hill, Woodcarver had chosen Flenser’s Old Castle as her seat of office, and Ravna had moved Oobii down to Hidden Island. In that first year, the queen had come to realize that however hastily it was built, the New Castle up on Starship Hill was the proper center for a great empire. She had moved herself up here, and asked Ravna to follow, putting Oobii back on the hill, guardian of all Woodcarver could see. Moving Oobii had not been easy; Ravna could not imagine that the ship would ever fly again. And now…?
Woodcarver exchanged looks with herself. Conflicted? “I’m sorry. I know, I asked for Oobii’s help. I know you have removed the beam gun’s amplifier stage. I would never regard your stewardship of Oobii as a threat. It’s just that lately I’m seeing the risks with new insight.
“Our dependence on your ship for all things makes it a single point of failure—I think that’s your technical term for it—which of course I learned from texts in Oobii’s archive. Isn’t it unwise to bet everything on the proper operation of a single part?”
For Ravna, the answer to that question had always been obvious. Ravna had a deadline. It might be less than a century away. She bowed her head. “I understand. But haven’t we discussed all this before? I thought we were agreed. We’re using Oobii to support Scrupilo’s research and move us as fast as possible.”
Woodcarver sighed. “Yes. In any case, we are too far down this path to change.”
Thank the Powers! Ravna suddenly realized that a disaster had been avoided. This was so much worse than what Pilgrim had said. “W-Woodcarver, if on balance you regard Oobii’s meeting place as a negative thing, just tell me clearly, and I’ll take it down.”
“No, I accept your reasoning, Ravna. I’m content with your new meeting place.”
“Our New Meeting Place, Woodcarver. Thank you.” Ravna cast around for some different topic of conversation. “S-so how are the border inspections going?” Since the cloaks’ disappearance, Woodcarver had attempted to enforce something like nation-state control on the various mountain passes leading over the Icefangs.
Woodcarver bobbed her heads in a smile. “All in place, and rather faster than I had thought possible.” She shrugged. “No matter. In this case, the real threat is not foreigners. I’m confident the cloaks never left the Domain.”
“Oh, right. Flenser.”
“You mean the reformed Flenser,” Woodcarver said archly. “Reformed or not, I know Flenser has always coveted the radio cloaks. They feed his messianic urges.”
“You could kick him off the Council.”
“I’ve thought of taking action against him. I don’t think you realize how clever he is. For a fact, I think he’s as clever as before his four were assassinated. Tyrathect, ‘the humble school teacher,’ was well chosen. And he still has plenty of political connections on Hidden Island and to the north. He’s too subtle to catch, and too powerful to ease aside.”
“But there’s no evidence he had anything to do with the theft.”
“There is a certain amount of indirect evidence. Pilgrim has noticed. Scrupilo would have noticed, if he weren’t so focused on the Tropicals.… Not many thieves could have escaped your pursuit, Ravna. You showed again the remarkable usefulness of Oobii.”
“Oh?”
“I got the details from Scrupilo, more than he said to the Council. You used all sorts of tricks that the Tropicals could never have guessed. No one who wasn’t deeply involved with Oobii technology could have slipped past your search. Scrupilo might have managed it. Maybe I could have—after a lot of research. And then there’s Flenser, who over the years has wangled who knows what out of Oobii—and who I still suspect stole Oliphaunt.”
Ravna opened her mouth to protest, then decided that she had already challenged Woodcarver’s paranoia too much today. In fact, whoever had stolen the Oliphaunt dataset had an oracle that in some ways was as significant as Oobii. Possession would make almost any sneaky plan feasible. And Woodcarver had absolute faith in her smartest offspring’s continuing villainy. I should be grateful, thought Ravna. Better that Woodcarver obsess about Flenser than about the New Meeting Place.
─────
When Ravna came back down the hill from the New Castle, it was an hour or two before midnight. The heather was in twilight. An occasional star was visible in the southern sky; there was the orbiting hulk of the freight device that had carried the Children’s Lander here.
The darkness and the clear sky together brought a deep chill that mostly hid during t
he summer. By the time Ravna reached Oobii, the breeze had picked up, driving like icy needles through her locally made sweater. The Children called such clothing “unspeakably dumb”; in any case, the fabric had no ability to average temperatures.
The lights from Oobii’s cargo bay—the New Meeting Place—splashed warm and welcoming out upon the hillside. Ravna stood in the outer fringes of the light and looked in. Even now, there were packs and Children within. They were probably just playing games, but even so, the sight comforted her. Woodcarver would eventually love this place.
But just now Ravna didn’t want to talk to anyone. She passed the light, continued on around the ship. Since the theft of the cloaks, local security had been a big topic at council meetings. Nevil, with Scrupilo in loud support, and Johanna soberly nodding, thought that any number of other terrible things might happen now, including smash-and-grab attacks. That sounded foolish to Ravna, but in fact, they didn’t know who they were up against. Maybe the added surveillance cams would help. Maybe they needed more guards. We’ll get all the evils of a nation state before we get the tech we need.
In any case, nothing could go wrong so close to her ship’s watchful eyes. She stepped near the hull, and Oobii quietly opened a hatch for her. She walked inside and let the ship take her up to her rooms by the bridge. She changed out of the heavy sweater and pants, into her shipboard clothes. Just doing that reminded her again of her special perks. Very soon she must move out of these digs. That had become a personal imperative, even though she hadn’t yet spoken of it to anyone. Living outside of Oobii would slow her work, but now she realized that staying aboard might be even more destructive.
Meantime, tonight, she had more than enough work to do, and it required all the tech that her starship bridge could provide:
What was Flenser-Tyrathect up to? Woodcarver had such strong suspicions about the pack. In fact, Ravna knew that some minor part of those suspicions was correct. The wily (reformed) monster had indeed figured out that Woodcarver had bugged his sanctums. But the reason Ravna knew that was also the reason she knew Flenser wasn’t behind the current mysteries.
She hunkered down in her favorite-style chair and called up Oobii’s surveillance suite—the High Beyond system that she had kept hidden from everyone.
The Out of Band II had been designed for operations at the Bottom of the Beyond and even in the Slow Zone (where they were now marooned). But the ship had been built in the Middle Beyond, where technology tapdanced at the edge of intelligibility. Almost none of the ship’s highest functions worked Down Here. Certainly, no ship could fly faster than light Down Here. And the antigravity was slowly dying. The natural-language translators were laughably incompetent. Even where local physics allowed a phenomenon, the ship’s software was often incapable of exploiting it. That was why a lot of Oobii’s design involved Very Dumb Solutions to classic problems.
Nevertheless, there were surprises. In the days after Pham died, after the Battle on Starship Hill, Ravna had taken inventory of what remained. Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers. The only other galactic on the planet was the Skroderider Greenstalk, and she was too soon gone. Oh, Greenstalk, how I miss you. The thought still popped up, for Greenstalk had been with her through all the most desperate times in space.
So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.
One such hardware system had survived Countermeasure’s surge. Even more miraculous, Oobii could still reconstruct the output. Early on, Ravna had to decide just who to target with that special surveillance. It had not been a difficult choice. The Old Flenser had created a strange culture that was both cruel and fiendishly inventive. Flenser had seemed every bit as dangerous as Woodcarver claimed.
And so one day during the early years, Ravna had infected Flenser-Tyrathect’s members with the surveillance system. The infestation was physically harmless, and the devices could not replicate, but there were more than enough devices to cover the pack, hopefully for as long as she needed them.
Over the years, Ravna had often wished—but never with the desperate frustration of one who has made a profound mistake—that she could infect somebody else with the surveillance system. But the “reformed” Flenser had been the greatest unknown, potentially the greatest threat, and Ravna’s camera had revealed to her that whatever strange thing Flenser-Tyrathect might be, it was not working against Woodcarver or Ravna or their plans for the Domain. That certainty had more than once brought Ravna to the verge of revealing her methods to Woodcarver. Now, after the misunderstanding about the New Meeting Place, Ravna wondered if she could ever dare tell her.
Woodcarver’s latest suspicions about Flenser and the radio cloaks made perfect sense—if one didn’t know about Ravna’s special surveillance. The ship was constantly monitoring the Flenser data, keeping a record of the reconstructed images and watching for specified alarm conditions. Ravna had reviewed that record very carefully in the days immediately after the theft of the radio cloaks, and the reformed Flenser had seemed just as darkly innocent as ever. What more could she do?
I wonder what the pack is up to right now, tonight? A frivolous thought perhaps, since “real time” views from the system were a strange and scattered thing. Nevertheless, Ravna made the request. Several seconds passed. Range was the great weakness of this system. Beyond the local area, reception became extremely ambiguous. Fortunately, Flenser had been out of the area only a few times in ten years—a very good consequence of Woodcarver’s strict hold on the fellow. The reports from the infestation were forwarded in unsynchronized driblets across the nearly random locations of devices that previously had been shed from the pack’s members. Sufficient data to build one picture might take a thousand seconds—and then less than one second for the next image.
Sometimes important adjustments would show up later and Oobii would revise the image stream in really strange ways.
Tonight, reception was poor, but as Oobii’s signal-processing software struggled with clues, the pictures gradually became clearer, more colorful, brighter. There were a few moments of motion and then the stream froze again. Ravna fiddled with the parameters.
Flenser was somewhere in the sub-basements of the Old Castle. He went there two or three times a year. Several years ago, Ravna had concluded that Flenser did indeed know where Woodcarver’s spy cameras were located. That was a scary conclusion, but then she realized that most of these trips “downstairs” were just part of Flenser’s hobby of enraging his pack parent.
There were exceptions; Flenser had some things he really didn’t want Woodcarver to know about. For instance, Woodcarver had forbidden Flenser to try to rehabilitate his creation, Steel. In that, Woodcarver had reneged on her peace treaty with Flenser. It was the only such incident Ravna knew of. The remains of Lord Steel were allowed to live, but as a slobbering, slashing threesome. The madpack had been kept in isolation, at the veterans’ fragmentarium.
For a time, it had looked like Flenser might restart the war over Woodcarver’s broken promise. Instead, he used the issue to win a number of concessions—including repossession of the Old Castle. But Ravna knew that the wily Flenser had not given up on Steel. In the early years, Flenser had often come down to these sub-basements to meet with Carenfret, a broodkenner at the Fragmentarium. That pack was unquestionably loyal to Woodcarver, and probably opposed to every one of th
e Old Flenser’s horrific experiments. Flenser and Carenfret had been conspiring all right, but only to persuade Woodcarver to make Steel whole. Maybe they would have succeeded eventually. Unfortunately, Steel’s problem was a torment from within; the poor wretch had fought itself to death, rendering the conspirators’ plans moot.
Ravna was certain that Woodcarver would not see things so forgivingly. Meeting down in the Old Castle catacombs was itself the stuff of treason. The chambers were steeped in horror. Woodcarver had once attempted an inventory of the place. Her packs had found at least five levels, with many fallen tunnels still unsurveyed.
In recent years, the catacombs had become much too intriguing to the Children. When they got to be ten or eleven years old, they just had to take a crack at exploring “Flenser’s Caves of Death.” If you counted natural erosion and rock falls, there were plenty of entrances, a new one discovered every few years. Sooner or later, some kid was going to fall down a hole and get killed. That and the onshore cliffs had been Ravna’s biggest day-to-day worries, until this Denier cult thing.
In tonight’s expedition, most of Flenser was carrying solar cell lamps. The light was scarcely brighter than tar torches, but it didn’t consume oxygen or make smoke. Ravna recognized the low-ceilinged cavern Flenser was passing through. Some kids had gotten lost here just last year. It was—she hoped—the most grisly place they would ever see. She remembered how it stank, even after all the years. The dark floor was punctuated with stone plugs that looked like small manhole covers. In the view Oobii synthesized from Flenser’s various heads, she could see the hexagonal pattern of dozens—hundreds—of covers stretching off into the darkness.
The picture stream froze. Oobii was waiting for signal or—more likely—had fallen behind in its analysis. Ravna didn’t rush it. She wanted the high-resolution video, and if it took a while for the clues to dribble in and be interpreted, that was fine. In fact, this sequence seemed usable. Sometimes, no matter how long she waited, all she could get was ambiguity.
