A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

  “W-what is it?” She looked back along its body, past the padded jacket. The Tine’s haunches were twisted at an odd angle, one legged dangling near the fire.

  “Don’t you know—” began Woodcarver. “This is part of Jaqueramaphan.” She pushed a nose under the dangling leg, and raised it onto the pillow.

  Note 622

  There was loud talk between the guards and Johanna’s servant. Through the door she saw members holding torches; they rested their forepaws on their fellows shoulders, and held the lights high. No one tried to come in; there’d be no room.

  Johanna looked back at the injured Tine. Scriber? Then she recognized the jacket. The creature looked back at her, still wheezing its pain. “Can’t you get a doctor!”

  Note 623

  Woodcarver was all around her. She answered, “I am a doctor, Johanna.” She nodded at the dataset and continued softly, “At least, what passes for one here.”

  Johanna wiped blood from the creature’s neck. More kept oozing. “Well, can you save him?”

  Note 624

  “This fragment maybe, but—” One of Woodcarver went to the door and talked to the packs beyond. “My people are searching for the rest of him…. I think he is mostly murdered, Johanna. If there were others … well, even fragments stick together.”

  Note 625

  “Has he said anything?” It was another voice, speaking Samnorsk. Scarbutt. His big ugly snout was stuck through the doorway.

  “No,” said Woodcarver. “And his mind noise is a complete jumble.”

  “Let me listen to him,” said Scarbutt.

  “You stay back, you!” Johanna’s voice was a scream; the creature in her arms twitched.

  Note 626

  “Johanna! This is Scriber’s friend. Let him help.” As the Scarbutt pack sidled into the room, Woodcarver climbed into the loft, giving him room.

  Johanna eased her arm from under the injured Tine and moved aside, ending up at the doorway herself. There were lots more packs outside than she had imagined, and they were standing closer than she had ever seen. Their torches glowed like soft fluorescents in the foggy dark.

  Her gaze snapped back to the fire pit. “I’m watching you!”

  Scarbutt’s members clustered around the pillow. The big one lay its head next to the injured Tine’s. For a moment the Tine continued its breathy whistling. Scarbutt gobbled at it. The reply was a steady warbling, almost beautiful. From up in the loft, Woodcaver said something. She and Scarbutt talked back and forth.

  “Well?” said Johanna.

  Note 627

  “Ja— the fragment — is not a ‘talker’,” came Woodcarver’s voice.

  Note 628

  “Worse,” said Scarbutt. “For now at least, I can’t match his mind sounds. I’m not getting sense or image from him; I can’t tell who murdered Scriber.”

  Note 629

  Johanna stepped back into the room, and walked slowly to the pillow. Scarbutt moved aside, but did not leave the wounded Tine. She knelt between two of him and petted the long, bloodied neck. “Will Ja” — she spoke the sound as best she could — “live?”

  Scarbutt ran three noses down the length of the body. They pressed gently at the wounds. Ja twisted and whistled … except when Scarbutt pressed his haunches. “I don’t know. Most of this blood is just splatter, probably from the other members. But his spine is broken. Even if the fragment lives, he’ll have only two usable legs.”

  Johanna thought for a moment, trying to see things from a Tinish perspective. She didn’t like the view. It might not make sense, but to her, this “Ja” was still Scriber — at least in potential. To Scarbutt, the creature was a fragment, an organ from a fresh corpse. A damaged one at that. She looked at Scarbutt, at the big, killer member. “So what does your kind do with such … garbage?”

  Note 630

  Three of his heads turned toward her, and she could see his hackles rise. His synthetic voice became high-pitched and staccato. “Scriber was a good friend. We could build a two-wheel cart for Ja’s rear; he’d be able to move around some. The hard part will be finding a pack for him. You know we’re looking for other fragments; we may be able to patch something up. If not … well, I have only four members. I will try to adopt him.” As he spoke one head patted the wounded member. “I’m not sure it will work. Scriber was not a loose- souled person, not in any way a pilgrim. And right now, I don’t match him at all.”

  Johanna slumped back. Scarbutt wasn’t responsible for everything that went wrong in the universe.

  Note 631

  “Woodcarver has excellent brood kenners. Maybe some other match can be found. But understand … it’s hard for adult members to remerge, especially non-talkers. Single fragments like Ja often die of their own accord; they just stop eating. Or sometimes…. Go down to the harbor sometime, look at the workers. You’ll see some big packs there … but with the minds of idiots. They can’t hold together; the smallest problem and they run in all directions. That’s how the unlucky repacks end….” Scarbutt’s voice traded back and forth between two of his members, and dribbled into silence. All his heads turned to Ja. The member had closed his eyes. Sleeping? He was still breathing, but it sounded kind of burbly.

  Johanna looked across the room at the trapdoor to the loft. Woodcarver had stuck a single head down through the hole. The upside- down face looked back at Johanna. Another time, her appearance would have been comical. “Unless a miracle happens, Scriber died today. Understand that, Johanna. But if the fragment lives, even a short time, we’ll likely find the murderer.”

  “How, if he can’t communicate?”

  “Yes, but he can still show us. I’ve ordered Vendacious’s men to confine the staff to quarters. When Ja is calmer, we’ll march every pack in the castle past him. The fragment certainly remembers what happened to Scriber, and wants to tell us. If any of the killers are our own people, he’ll see them.”

  “And he’ll make a fuss.”Just like a dog.

  “Right. So the main thing is to provide him with security right now … and hope our doctors can save him.”

  * * *

  They found the rest of Scriber a couple of hours later, on a turret of the old wall. Vendacious said it looked like one or two packs had come out of the forest and climbed the turret, perhaps in an attempt to see onto the grounds. It had all the markings of an incompetent, first-time probe: nothing of value could be seen from that turret, even on a clear day. But for Scriber it had been fatally bad luck. Apparently he had surprised the intruders. Five of his members had been variously arrowed, hacked, decapitated. The sixth — Ja — had broken his back on the sloping stonework at the base of the wall. Johanna walked out to the turret the next day. Even from the ground she could see brownish stains on the parapet. She was glad she couldn’t go to the top.

  Ja died during the night, though not from any further enemy action; he was under Vendacious’s protection the whole time.

  Johanna went the next few days without saying much. At night she cried a little. God damn their “doctoring”. A broken back they could diagnose, but hidden injuries, internal bleeding — of such they were completely ignorant. Apparently, Woodcarver was famous for her theory that the heart pumped the blood around the body. Give her another thousand years and maybe she could do better than a butcher!

  For a while she hated them all: Scarbutt for all the old reasons, Woodcarver for her ignorance, Vendacious for letting Flenserists get so close to the castle … and Johanna Olsndot for rejecting Scriber when he had tried to be a friend.

  What would Scriber say now? He had wanted her to trust them. He said that Scarbutt and the others were good people. One night, about a week later, she came close to making peace with herself. She was lying on her pallet, the quilt heavy and warm upon her. The designs painted on the walls glimmered dim in the emberlight. All right, Scriber. For you … I will trust them.

  Note 632

  Chapter 20

  Note 633

  Pham
Nuwen remembered almost nothing of the first days after dying, after the pain of the Old One’s ending. Ghostly figures, anonymous words. Someone said he’d been kept alive in the ship’s surgeon. He remembered none of it. Why they kept the body breathing was a mystery and an affront. Eventually the animal reflexes had revived. The body began breathing of its own accord. The eyes opened. No brain damage, Greenstalk(?) said, a full recovery. The husk that had been a living being spoke no contradiction.

  What was left of Pham Nuwen spent a lot of time on the OOB‘s bridge. From before, the ship reminded him of a fat sowbug. The bugs had been common in the straw laid across the floor of the Great Hall of this father’s castle on Canberra. The little kids had played with them. The critters didn’t have real legs, just a dozen feathery spines sticking out from a chitinous thorax. No matter how you tumbled them, those spines/antennas would twitch the bug around and it would scuttle on its way, unmindful that it might be upside down from before. Yes, the OOB‘s ultradrive spines looked a lot like a sowbug’s, though not as articulate. And the body itself was fat and sleek, slightly narrowed in the middle.

  So Pham Nuwen had ended inside of a sowbug. How fitting for a dead man.

  And now he sat on the bridge. The woman brought him here often; she seemed to know it should fascinate him. The walls were displays, better than he had ever seen in merchantman days. When the windows looked out the ship’s exterior cameras, the view was as good as from any crystal-canopy bridge in the Qeng Ho fleet.

  Note 634

  It was like something out of the crudest fantasy — or a graphics simulation. If he sat long enough, he could actually see the stars move in the sky. The ship was doing about ten hyperjumps per second: jump, recompute and jump again. In this part of The Beyond they could go a thousandth of a light-year on each jump — farther, but then the recompute time would be substantially worse. At ten per second that added up to more than thirty light-years per hour. The jumps themselves were imperceptible to human senses, and between the jumps the were in free fall, carrying the same intrinsic velocity they’d had on departing Relay. So there was none of the doppler shifting of relativistic flight; the stars were as pure as seen from some desert sky, or in low-speed transit. Without any fuss, they simply slid across the sky, the closer ones the faster. In half an hour he went farther than he had in half a century with the Qeng Ho.

  Note 635

  Greenstalk drifted onto the bridge one day, began changing the windows. As usual she spoke to Pham as she did so, chatting almost as if there were a real person here to listen:

  “See. The center window is an ultrawave map of the region directly behind us.” Greenstalk waved a tendril over the controls. The multicolored pictures appeared on the other walls. “Similarly for the other five points of direction.”

  The words were noise in Pham’s ears, understood but of no interest. The Rider paused, then continued with something like the futile persistence of the Ravna woman.

  “When ships make a jump … when they reenter, there’s a kind of an ultrawave splash. I’m checking if we’re being followed.”

  Colors on the windows all around, even in front of Pham’s eyes. There were smooth gradations, no bright spots, no linear features.

  “I know, I know,” she said, making up both sides of the conversation. “The ship’s analyzers are still massaging the data. But if anyone’s pacing us closer than one hundred light-years, we’ll see them. And if they’re farther than that — well, then they probably can’t detect us.”

  Note 636

  It doesn’t matter. Pham almost shut the question out of his mind. But there were no stars to look at; he stared at the glowing colors and actually thought about the problem. Thought. A joke: no one Down Here ever really thought about anything. Perhaps ten thousand starships had escaped the Fall of Relay. Most likely, the Enemy had not cataloged those departures. The attack on Relay had been a minor adjunct to the murder of Old One. Most likely, the OOB had escaped unnoticed. Why should the Enemy care where the last of Old One’s memories might be hiding? Why should it care about where their little ship might be bound?

  A tremor passed through his body; animal reflex, surely.

  Note 637

  * * *

  Note 638

  Panic was slowly rising in Ravna Bergsndot, every day a little stronger. It was not any particular disaster, just the slow dying of hope. She tried to be near Pham Nuwen part of every day, to talk to him, to hold his hand. He never responded, not even — except perhaps by accident — to look at her. Greenstalk tried too. Alien though Greenstalk was, the Pham of before had seemed truly attracted to the Riders. He was off all medical support now, but he might as well have been a vegetable.

  And all the while their descent was slowing, always a little worse than what Blueshell had predicted.

  Note 639

  And when she turned to the News … in some ways that was the most horrifying of all. The “death race” theory was getting popular. More and more, there were folk who seemed to think that the human race was spreading the Blight:

  Note 640

  Note 641

  Crypto: 0

  Syntax: 43

  As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc

  Note 642

  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.]

  Note 643

  Subject: Blighter Video thread

  Distribution:

  Threat of the Blight

  War Trackers Interest Group

  Homo Sapiens Interest Group

  Note 644

  Date: 17.95 days since Fall of Relay

  Note 645

  Text of message:

  Note 646

  So far we’ve processed half a million messages about this creature’s video, and read a goodly fraction of them. Most of you are missing the point. The principle of the “Helper’s” operation is clear. This is a Transcendent Power using ultralight communication to operate through a race in the Beyond. It would be fairly easy to do in the Transcend — there are a number of stories about thralls of Powers there. But for such communication to be effective within the Beyond, truly extensive design changes must be made in the minds of the controlled race. It could not have happened naturally, and it can not be quickly done to new races — no matter what the Blight says.

  We’ve watched the Homo Sapiens interest group since the first appearance of the Blight. Where is this “Earth” the humans claim to be from? “Half way around the galaxy,” they say, and deep in the Slow Zone. Even their proximate origin, Nyjora, is conveniently in the Slowness. We see an alternative theory: Sometime, maybe further back than the last consistent archives, there was a battle between Powers. The blueprint for this “human race” was written, complete with communication interfaces. Long after the original contestants and their stories had vanished, this race happened to get in position where it could Transcend. And that Transcending was tailor-made, too, re-establishing the Power that had set the trap to begin with.

  We’re not sure of the details, but a scenario such as this is inevitable. What we must do is also clear. Straumli Realm is at the heart of the Blight, obviously beyond all attack. But there are other human colonies. We ask the Net to help in identifying all of them. We ourselves are not a large civilization, but we would be happy to coordinate the information gathering, and the military action that is required to prevent the Blight’s spread in the Middle Beyond.

  Note 647

  For nearly seventeen weeks, we’ve been calling for action. Had you listened in the beginning, a concerted strike might have been sufficient to destroy the Straumli Realm. Isn’t the Fall of Relay enough to wake you up? Friends, if we act together we still have a chance.

  Death to vermin.

  Note 648

  The bastards even played on humanity’s foundling nature. Foun
dling races were rare, but scarcely unknown. Now these Death-to- Vermin creatures were turning the Miracle of Nyjora into something deadly evil.

  Death to Vermin were the only ones to call for pogroms, but even respected posters were saying things that indirectly might support such action:

  Note 649

  Crypto: 0

  Syntax: 43

  As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc

  Note 650

  Language path: Triskweline, SjK units

  From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]

  Subject: Blighter Video thread, Hanse subthread

  Key phrases: limits on the Blight; the Blight is searching something

  Distribution:

  Threat of the Blight

  Close-coupled Automation Interest Group

  War Trackers Interest Group

  Date: 11.94 days since Fall of Relay

  Note 651

  Text of message:

  Note 652

  The Blight admits that it is a Power that tele-operates sophonts in the Beyond. But consider how difficult it is to have a close- coupled automation with time lags of more than a few milliseconds. The Known Net is a perfect illustration of this: Lags range between five milliseconds for systems that are a couple of light-years apart — to (at least) several hundred seconds when messages must pass through intermediate nodes. This, combined with the low bandwidth available across interstellar distances, makes the Known Net a loose forum for the exchange of information and lies. And these restrictions are inherent in the nature of the Beyond, part of the same restrictions that make it impossible for the Powers to exist down here.

  Note 653

  We conclude that even the Blight can’t attain close-coupled control except in the High Beyond. At the Top, the Blight’s sophont agents are literally its limbs. In the Middle Beyond, we believe mental “possession” is possible but that considerable preprocessing must be done in the controlled mind. Furthermore, considerable external equipment (the bulky items characteristic of those depths) is needed to support the communication. Direct, millisecond-by-millisecond, control is normally impractical in the Middle Beyond. Combat at this level would involve hierarchical control. Long-term operations would also use intimidation, fraud, and traitors.