by Vernor Vinge
Note 1053
“Glimfrelle! Check the raw stream we got from Central. Did they send us any sync pictures?”
Note 1054
It took Glimfrelle only seconds. He whistled a sharp tone of surprise. “No, Boss. And since it was all properly encrypted, our end just made do with old ad animation.” He said something to Tirolle, and the two twittered rapidly. “Nothing seems to work down here. Maybe this is just another bug.” But Glimfrelle didn’t sound very confident of the assertion.
Note 1055
Svensndot turned back to the picture from the Out of Band. “Look. The channel to Fleet Central was fully encrypted, using one- time schemes I trust more than what we’re talking with now. I can’t believe it was a masquerade.” But nausea was creeping up Kjet’s guts. This was like the first minutes of the Battle for Sjandra Kei, when he guessed how thoroughly they had been outmaneuvered, when he realized that everyone he was trying to protect would be murdered. “Hei, we’ll contact other vessels. We’ll verify Central’s location — “
Pham Nuwen raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it wasn’t a masquerade.” Before he could say more, one of the Riders — the one with the greater skrode — was shouting at them. It rolled across the room’s apparent ceiling, pushing the humans aside to get close to the camera. “I have a question!” The voder speech was burred, nearly unintelligible. The creature’s tendrils rattled dryly against each other, as distressed as Kjet Svensndot had ever heard. “My question: Are there Skroderiders aboard your fleet’s command vessel?”
Note 1056
“Why do you—”
“Answer the question!”
“How should I know?” Kjet tried to think. “Tirolle. You have friends on Skrits’ staff. Are there any Riders aboard?”
Tirolle stuttered a few bars, “A’a’a’a. Yes. Emergency hires — rescues actually — right after the battle.”
“That’s the best we can do, friend.”
The Skroderider trembled, unspeaking. Then its tendrils seemed to wilt. “Thank you,” it said softly. It rolled back and out of camera range.
Note 1057
Pham Nuwen disappeared from view. Ravna looked wildly around, “Wait please!” she said to the camera, and Kjet was looking at the abandoned command deck of the Out of Band. At the limit of the pickup’s hearing came sounds of mumbled conversation, voder and human. Then she was back.
Note 1058
“What was that all about?” Svensndot to Ravna.
“N-Nothing any of us can help anymore…. Captain Svensndot, it looks to me like your fleet is no longer run by the people you think.”
“Maybe.”Probably.“It’s something I’ve got to think about.”
She nodded. For a moment they looked at each other, unspeaking. So strange, so far from home and after all the heartbreak … to see someone so familiar. “You were truly at Relay?” the question sounded stupid in his ears. Yet in a way she was a bridge from what he knew and trusted to the deadly weirdness of the present situation.
Ravna Bergsndot nodded. “Yes … and it was like everything you’ve read. We even had direct contact with a Power…. And yet it was not enough, Group Captain. The Blight destroyed it all. That part of the News is no lie.”
Tirolle pushed back from his nav station. “Then how can anything you do down here hurt the Blight?” The words were blunt, but ‘Rolle’s eyes were wide and serious. In fact, he was pleading for some sense behind all the death. Dirokimes had not been the greatest part of the Sjandra Kei civilization, but they had been by far its oldest member race. A million years ago they had burst out of the Slow Zone, colonizing the three systems that humans one day would call Sjandra Kei. Long before the humans arrived, they were a race of inward dreamers. They protected their star systems with ancient automation and friendly younger races. Another half million years and their race might be gone from the Beyond, extinct or evolved into something else. It was a common pattern, something like death and old age, but gentler.
There is a common misconception about such senescent races, that their members are senescent too. In any large population, there will be variation. There will always be those who want to see the outside world and play there for a while. Humankind had gotten on very well with the likes of Glimfrelle and Tirolle.
And Bergsndot seemed to understand. “Have any of you heard of godshatter?”
Kjet said, “No,” then noticed that both Dirokimes had started. They whistled at each other for several seconds in some kind of surprise dialect. “Yes,” ‘Rolle spoke at last in Samnorsk, his voice as close to awe as Kjet had ever heard. “You know we Dirokimes have been in the Beyond for a long time. We’ve sent many colonies into the Transcend; some became Powers…. And once … Something came back. It wasn’t a Power of course. In fact, it was more like a mind- crippled Dirokime. But it knew things and did things that made great changes for us.”
“Fentrollar?” Kjet asked wonderingly, suddenly recognizing the story. It had happened one hundred thousand years before humankind arrived at Sjandra Kei, yet it was a central contradiction of the Dirokime terranes.
“Yes.” Tirolle said. “Even now people don’t agree if Fentrollar was a gift or a curse, but he founded the dream habitats and the Old Religion.”
Ravna nodded, “That’s the case most familiar to us of Sjandra Kei. Maybe it’s not a happy example considering all its effects….” and she told them about the fall of Relay, what had happened to Old One, and what had become of Pham Nuwen. The Dirokimes side chat dwindled to zero and they were very still.
Finally Kjet said, “So what does Nu—” he stumbled over the name, as strange as everything else about this fellow, “Nuwen know about the thing you seek at the Bottom? What can he do with it?”
“I-I don’t know, Group Captain. Pham Nuwen himself doesn’t know. A little bit at a time, the insight comes. I believe, because I was there for some of it … but I don’t know how to make you believe.” She drew a shuddering breath. Kjet suddenly guessed what a strange, tortured place the Out of Band must be. Somehow that made the story more credible. Anything that really could destroy the Blight would be unwholesomely weird. Kjet wondered how he would do, locked up with such a thing.
“My Lady Ravna,” he said, the words stilted and formal. After all, I’m suggesting treason.“I, uh, I’ve got a number of friends in the Commercial Security fleet. I can check on the suspicions you’ve raised, and …”say it!“it’s possible we can give you support in spite of my HQ.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you.”
Glimfrelle broke the silence. “We’re getting a poor signal on the Out of Band‘s channel now.”
Kjet eyes swept the windows. All the ultratrace displays looked like random noise. Whatever this storm was, it was bad.
“Looks like we won’t be talking much longer, Ravna Bergsndot.”
“Yes. We’re losing signal…. Group Captain, if none of this works, if you can’t fight for us…. Your people are all that’s left of Sjandra Kei. It’s been good to see you and the Dirokimes…. after so long to see familiar faces, people I really understand. I—” as she spoke, her image square-blurred into low-frequency components.
“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.
Note 1059
“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:
Note 1060
#######Yes. It is more than a communicati
Note 1061
Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. “Zip. Zero,” he said. “No detectable signal.”
Note 1062
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 sec
onds.” They had been doing five jumps a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now….
Note 1063
Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. “Hei — so welcome to the Slow Zone.”
* * *
Note 1064
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….”
Note 1065
“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.
Note 1066
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.”
Note 1067
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.”
Note 1068
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.
Note 1069
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.
Note 1070
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?”
Note 1071
“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.
* * *
Note 1072
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.
Note 1073
Any time now…. There was scarcely any reason to do much about resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.
Note 1074
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.)
Note 1075
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.