A Fire Upon the Deep zot-1, page 46
part #1 of Zones of Thought Series
“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 quitting 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.
CHAPTER 34
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 fungus. 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.
The troops on the walls backed far out of his way. This was more than courtesy, more than their fear of Steel. His troops were still not used to the cloaked ones, and the cover story Shreck was spreading did nothing to ease their minds: Lord Steel was accompanied by a singleton—in the colors of a Lord. The creature made no mind sounds. It walked incredibly close to its master.
Steel said to the singleton, “Success is a matter of meeting a schedule. I remember you teaching me that,” cutting it into me, in fact.
The member looked back at him, cocked its head. “As I remember, I said that success was a matter of adapting to changes in schedules.” The words were perfectly articulated. There were singletons that could talk that well—but even the most verbal could not carry on intelligent conversation. Shreck had had no trouble convincing the troops that Flenser science had created a race of superpacks, that the cloaked ones were individually as smart as any ordinary pack. It was a good cover for what the cloaks really were. It both inspired fear and obscured the truth.
The member stepped a little closer—nearer to Steel than anyone had been except during murders and rapes and the beatings of the past. Involuntarily, Steel licked his lips and spread out from around the threat. Yet in some ways the dark-cloaked one was like a corpse, without a trace of mind sound. Steel snapped his jaws shut and said, “Yes. The genius is in winning even when the schedules have fallen down the garderobe.” He looked all away from the Flenser member and scanned the red-shrouded southern horizon. “What’s the latest estimate of Woodcarver’s progress?”
“She’s still camped about five days southeast of here.”
“The damned incompetent. It’s hard to believe she’s your parent! Vendacious made things so easy for her; her soldiers and toy cannon should have been here almost a tenday past—”
“And been well-butchered, on schedule.”
“Yes! Long before our sky friends arrived. Instead, she wanders inland and then balks.”
The Flenser member shrugged in its dark cloak. Steel knew the radio was as heavy as it looked. It consoled him that the other was paying a price for his omniscience. Just think, in heat like this, to have every part of oneself muffled to the tympana. He could imagine the discomfort… Indoors, he could smell it.
They walked past one of the wall cannon. The barrel gleamed of layered metal. The thing had thrice the range of Woodcarver’s pitiful invention. While Woodcarver had been working with Dataset and a human child’s intuition, he had had the direct advice of Ravna and company. At first he’d feared their largesse, thinking it meant the Visitors were superior beyond need for care. Now… the more he heard of Ravna and the others, the more clearly he understood their weakness. They could not experiment with themselves, improve themselves. Inflexible, slow-changing dullards. Sometimes they showed a low cunning—Ravna’s coyness about what she wanted from the first starship—but their desperation was loud in all their messages, as was their attachment to the human child.
Everything had been going so well till just a few days ago. As they walked out of earshot of the gunner pack, Steel said to the Flenser member, “And still no word from our ‘rescuers’.”
“Quite so,” That was the other botched schedule, the important one, which they could not control. “Ravna has missed four sessions. Two of me is down with Amdijefri right now.” The singleton jabbed its snout toward the dome of the inner keep. The gesture was an awkward abortion. Without other muzzles and other eyes, body language was a limited thing. We just aren’t built to wander around a piece here, a piece there. “Another few minutes and the space folk will have missed a fifth talk session. The children are getting desperate, you know.”
The member’s voice sounded sympathetic. Almost unconsciously, Lord Steel sidled a little farther out from around it. Steel remembered that tone from his own early existence. He also remembered the cutting and death that had always followed. “I want them kept happy, Tyrathect. We’re assuming communication will resume; when it does we’ll need them.” Steel bared six pairs of jaws at the surrounded singleton. “None of your old tricks.”
The member flinched, an almost imperceptible twitch that pleased Steel more than the grovelling of ten thousand. “Of course not. I’m just saying that you should visit them, try to help them with their fear.”
“You do it.”
“Ah… they don’t fully trust me. I’ve told you before, Steel; they love you.”
“Ha! And they’ve seen through to your meanness, eh?” The situation made Steel proud. He had succeeded where Flenser’s own methods would have failed. He had manipulated without threats or pain. It had been Steel’s craziest experiment, and certainly his most profitable. But “— Look, I don’t have time to wetnurse anyone. It’s a tiresome thing to talk to those two.” And it was very tiresome to hold his temper, to suffer Jefri’s “petting” and Amdi’s pranks. In the beginning, Steel had insisted that no one else have close contact with the children. They were too important to expose to others; the most casual slipup might show them the truth and ruin them. Even now, Tyrathect was the only pack besides himself who had regular contact. But for Steel, every meeting was worse than the last, an ultimate test of his self control. It was hard to think straight in a killing rage, and that’s how almost every conversation with them ended for Steel. How wonderful it would be when the space folk landed. Then he could use the other end of the tool that was Amdijefri. Then there would be no need to have their trust and friendship. Then he would have a lever, something to torture and kill to enforce his demands.
