by VernorVinge
“I will care for the radio every minute,” Johanna promised.
They dithered a moment more, maybe wondering if they should break apart or stay the night with her. Then they bobbed their heads and turned to leave. Whew.
“We go,” said Cheepers and his friends. “Listen to the other radios.”
“What?”
“In boxes. Fours of fours of fours of radios.”
CHAPTER 24
Bili Yngva was the number two player in Nevil Storherte’s Disaster Study Group. Privately, Bili considered himself the brains of the operation and Nevil the smooth-talking mouth. Thus Bili was always amazed at how much scutwork he ended up with. For instance, somebody had to do maintenance aboard Oobii. The starship was the center of power on this world and the highest system technology for lightyears around. Lose control of Oobii and the DSG would fall in a matter of days. The traitors, the know-nothings, and the dog-lovers would take over. More likely, the local warlord would kill all the humans, dog-lovers or not. Woodcarver was a deadly threat even when she was at the mercy of Oobii.
Whoever did maintenance had to have admin authority over the starship. Very rightly, Nevil didn’t trust anyone but himself and Bili Yngva with that power. So, natch, Bili ended up here most nights, “master of the world.”
Bili switched from camera to camera, snooping around through places that Woodcarver and Scrupilo thought were their private territory. It might have been fun if it weren’t so tedious. Without a doubt, Oobii was the dumbest piece of automation Bili had ever encountered. In the High Beyond, there were ribosome plugins smarter than this starship. Sitting here at the local Pinnacle of Everything just reminded Bili of how low they were in the pits of hell. He could almost see why the dog-lovers had gone native. If you wanted to do anything with the Oobii, it had to be done manually. The ship couldn’t think tactically, much less do strategic planning. All that must be done by Nevil and—mostly—Bili. The starship was simply too dumb for a real genius like Gannon Jorkenrud to use. And if you let the ship putter forward on its own defaults, all sorts of terrible crap would start to happen.
This was where Bili really missed Ravna Bergsndot. Powers, what a slope-skulled Neanderthal that Sjandran was. Yes, she looked like a human, but just talk to her for a few minutes and you realized you were trying to make points with a monkey. On the other hand, her limitations had made her a perfect match for Oobii. Bili remembered the thousands of hours she had spent here, working out the tedious details that made this little settlement possible. Hell, it was what he was trying to adapt for his own project. It was a shame she’d been so bloody dangerous.
Bili pulled up the notes he had compiled for his Best Hope planning: they just sat there, drawing only the simplest conclusions from the latest spy camera surveillance. Both Johanna Olsndot and the pack Pilgrim were definitively out of the picture. That had weakened Woodcarver as much as the disappearance of the Bergsndot woman, but there were a lot of loose ends.
Gannon must be retrieved. Unfortunately, Eyes Above 2 was proving hellishly difficult to operate; after all, it was a machine from before the dawn of technology. For that matter, Oobii had lost track of Gannon’s expedition! Bili had shifted the orbiter some degrees eastwards, trying to get a better view of the search area. So far he had found nothing.
Nevil’s contacts with Woodcarver’s enemies claimed Ravna Bergsndot was dead, or soon would be. Okay, if that’s the way it had to be. But even with her gone, Woodcarver had managed to co-opt more of the Children. If they demanded another election and if Nevil couldn’t smooth-talk his way to another victory—well, then Nevil said (very privately, just to Bili) that maybe they should use Oobii against their own classmates. Nevil figured it would just be a few deaths, a temporary tyranny. Besides, he said, tyranny was the natural organizational form Down Here. Maybe so, but Nevil had gotten way too bloody-minded; now he’d upgraded the ship’s beam gun with an amplifier stage. We should be protecting humanity. We need everyone if we’re going to climb back to the Transcend. Bili was working on an alternative plan to cope with a Woodcarver attack, something that wouldn’t harm any more Children, whatever their loyalties—and would leave the Disaster Study Group in a position to counter-move at its leisure. He just had to model the thing clearly enough to convince Nevil.
Bili forced his mind to plod through the endless detail that was necessary to work with Oobii. How had humankind ever survived the dark ages of Slow Zone programming…?
When next he noticed the time, it was nearing morning. This was going to turn into an all-nighter. He must have been at it for another hour or so, when Oobii began acting strangely. That wasn’t unusual, of course. Any time you asked Oobii for something novel, however simple, you were also asking for new stupidity. At first, this latest weirdness just looked like more bugs: three million lines of intermediate code had just collapsed into a few squiggles of script that Bili didn’t recognize. The so-called “results window” started scrolling sentences in simple Samnorsk. At first he thought it was another of those infinitely useless stack tracebacks that happened every time the system claimed that Bili had made a mistake.
Something was flashing a friendly shade of green at him. It was a warning from the resource monitor. He’d set that up to watch for secret grabs by players such as the Bergsndot woman. With both her and Ristling gone, this would be somebody else messing around. Øvin Verring? Øvin was more and more a pain in the neck, but he wasn’t the kind who conspired. Wait. Resource use was, huh, over one hundred percent. For a moment Bili couldn’t make sense of the representation—and of course Oobii made no effort to enlighten him. Now usage was at 100% times ten thousand! Maybe Oobii had found a new way to go wrong. Over the next five seconds, usage increased to 100% times seven million. And then he noticed that the user was listed as…Bili Yngva.
Somebody is jerking me around. And this was not some school-chum jape. He searched wildly for options. Could he shut this down? That green resource alarm—he’d never seen that before. He queried help, and for once got a relevant reply:
The resource monitor notes that the ship has upgraded to standard processing components. The ship is now handling your planning job in state—0 which is only ten million times greater than the capacity of the Slow Zone emergency processors. For more reasonable performance, you should consider asking for non-deterministic extensions.
“Holy shit,” he said softly. This could mean only one thing. The great darkness had ebbed; Tines World was no longer in the Slow Zone. The walls around him shimmered, jobs wakening. Some of these tasks must be ten years old, suspended when Pham Nuwen had done his killing. Most of the jobs flickered into termination, the ship recognizing that they were no longer relevant. A few jobs grew across Bili’s vision. His painfully constructed planning program was being rewritten, being merged with the Oobii’s tech archive, which was now running with something like internal motivation.
Bili watched the process for several seconds, shocked into immobility. The displays were mostly unintelligible, but he recognized the inference patterns. This was mid-Beyond automation, perhaps the best Oobii had ever been capable of. Bili was surprised to feel tears come to his eyes, that something so simple-minded could bring such a surge of joy. I can work with this. He waved for an interface, but felt no increased understanding. Shit. Maybe all the salvage wrecking they’d done on Oobii had destroyed the capability. Or maybe the ship had never been that capable. He leaned forward, watching the patterns. It didn’t really matter. He could see that the basic patterns were Beyonder. Reality graphics should be possible, even if they had to bootstrap from natural matter. He looked from process to process, probing with questions, thinking about the answers and the consequences. Most of the thinking still had to go on inside his head, but after ten years he’d gotten pretty good at that.
Then he hit the most important insight of all. And apparently it was a gift from Ravna Bergsndot: a set of simple windows that pointed him where he should have been looking all along. The
bitch had known something like this could happen! She’d set the Oobii to run a zonograph, to monitor the relevant physical laws. But what had just happened was orders of magnitude greater than that program’s detection threshold. It was so great that Oobii had restarted its standard automation.
He pushed the other projects aside, waved for more detail and explanation…Okay, Bergsndot had used a seismic metaphor for shifts in the zone boundary. Bili’s lips twisted into a smile. That made sense, depending on your model’s probability distribution. In this case, hah! Maybe the better metaphor was the ending of sleep state. The shift had begun one hundred seconds earlier, but had risen so fast that Oobii could go to its standard mode automation less than ten seconds later. Improvement had leveled off over the next minute, but now the physics was mid-Beyonder. A reasonable starship—even the Out of Band II, if they hadn’t gutted it—could fly at dozens of lightyears per hour. For this region of space, that was better than status quo ante Pham Nuwen. And that meant…
Rescue was not centuries in the future, the remote promise that Bergsndot’s twisted mind considered a threat. She had always claimed that the rescue fleet was just thirty lightyears away. Now on Tines World, the Zone physics was still improving. What was it like thirty lightyears higher?
Bili turned the zonograph program this way and that, trying to see the state of near interstellar space. Oobii was smart enough that it should be helping. Oh. Explanations hung all around his various demands. The only accessible zone probes were onboard. If the ship had slightly more distant stations—even a lightyear away—a reasonable extrapolation might be made.
Bili waved down the objections and forced an extrapolation, presumably based on historical gradients. The result came back in the pale violet of extreme uncertainty. Bili was warned. Nevertheless…the windows showed a fleet of dozens of starships, translating under ultradrive. The rescuers were thirty lightyears zone-higher, and the violet estimate showed a pseudo-velocity of fifty lightyears per hour. Rescue was not centuries or even years away. It would arrive within the hour.
The hard numbers from the ship’s instruments showed that the Zone improvements had leveled off. It didn’t matter! After today, this exile would just be a very bad memory. With working ultradrive, the rescuers could take them higher and higher, finally reaching the Transcend. There, borkners like Gannon and Jefri (at least if this world had not completely destroyed Jef’s potential) could rebuild the High Lab, complete what their parents and all of Straumli Realm had dreamed of.
In less than an hour they could say good-bye to this soul-sucking trap.
Huh? In the violet display, the estimated fleet velocity had fallen to thirty lightyears per hour. Yeah, but that was vaporous conjecture. Oobii’s zonograph still showed—Bili’s eyes flickered around the displays; data fusion was next to impossible Down Here. The ship’s zonograph showed local conditions degrading. Maximum possible ultradrive velocity right here, right now, was fifteen lightyears per hour. Twelve.
So what does it matter? Rescue might be an hour away, or a day. Or a tenday. But a sickening chill spread up from Bili’s gut. Maybe Pham Nuwen’s Zone Shift was not a diseased sleep. Maybe Ravna Bergsndot had had the right metaphor.
Conditions still degrading. The hard local estimate: five lightyears per…year. No, no, no! The violet fleet was just twenty lightyears out, broadjump distance if you were at the Top of the Beyond.
Two lightyears per year. Operation alarms were flickering all over. Oobii couldn’t maintain standard computation in this deadly environment. Bili waved for it to try.
Afterwards, Bili realized that it was unwise to make demands of Beyonder automation when it was near its operational limits; you might win the argument. The zonograph estimate hit 1.0 lightyears per year—and all around him the displays reformatted, or simply crashed. The ship’s lighting brightened, but Bili knew that it and he and all of Tines World had fallen back into stygian darkness.
He sat in the programmatic ruins for a moment, too shocked to move. For just—193 seconds according to a surviving clock display—salvation had been at hand. Now it was jerked away. He just wanted to start bawling. Instead he forced himself to survey the damage. During those three minutes, the Oobii had probably done more solid computation than it had in the last ten years. There were the results of his planning project—now reinforced with technical details for using their surviving equipment, and political options for Nevil. There was the record of the Zone surge itself. Maybe they could learn from that what more progress might be expected. There was…there was ongoing data loss! The ship had run on its standard processors right till the Slow Zone crashed down on it. The transition to backup computation had been successful, but translating data to passive/dumb formats had been interrupted. Absent intelligent refresh, the physical memories themselves were fading. What was left, even the passives, needed manual backup immediately.
Bili hunched forward, waving commands. Don’t panic. He had lots of practice getting things done in this environment. Don’t skip any steps, don’t make any mistakes. Don’t panic. If Nevil and Øvin or Merto had been online, all working together, they could have saved almost everything. Yeah, but what did the dogs say? “If wishes were froghens we’d never go hungry?” The dogs knew the limits of their world, even though they didn’t recognize them as limits.
Bili managed to capture almost all the data from his planning program. From the headers, it looked like good stuff, insight that would help him persuade Nevil that Best Hope was doable. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell how much detail had survived reformatting. And partway through his rescue of the Best Hope data, a burning smell rose from the zonograph displays, the classic diagnostic for lost data. Damn it, I can’t be everywhere at once! He riffled through Bergsndot’s notes. The program itself was a simple sequential, something that would have made sense to the earliest humans. That kind of recipe did not easily get lost. But the violet analysis and the raw zonograph session, those were gone.
He ran a quick heal on the zonograph spew and restarted the program. Meantime, he finished an oh-so-gentle foldup of his Best Hope output. And finally, he did what Nevil would complain that he should have done first thing:
“Ship, give me a secure link to Nevil.” Bili was firmly back in caveman mode now. He even remembered to specify that the link be secure. Among other things, that meant the comm would go to Nevil’s head-up display, or by direct line of sight to Nevil’s town house.
Unfortunately, there was only one HUD left, and Nevil was just as careful as Ravna Bergsndot had been about using it. Nearly ten seconds passed, and then a woman replied: “Yeah?”
“Um, hei Tami. May I speak to Nevil, please?”
“Hei Bili. Nevil went up to Newcastle—you know, getting ready for the big protest against Woodcarver’s conspiracy. He made me stay behind to be his answering machine. So what’s your message?” There was a pouting tone to her voice. Tami was no Johanna Olsndot, but she could be trouble in other ways. Bili wasn’t quite sure what Nevil saw in her.
“No, that’s okay, I’ll catch him at the meeting. Thanks, Tam.”
—————
Bili stared at the zonograph display for a moment more. It was showing low levels of random noise. Most likely, the Slow Zone was again lightyears deep above them. But that could change in seconds…or years. And Nevil had to be told immediately. Nevertheless, Bili took a few minutes to make sure nothing open-ended was running, nothing that would fry its own output if there were another surge/crash.
He hustled off the command deck, down to the great meeting hall. For a wonder, the place was empty. Somehow, Nevil had persuaded everybody, even the die-hard dog-lovers to attend the rally. Maybe folks were finally getting the message: with Bergsndot and Johanna gone, they had only one hope for salvation and that was Nevil and the DSG.
He stepped out of doors, into a solid wall of cold. Fortunately, the air was still and he didn’t freeze anything. He stepped back into the relative warmth of the entranceway an
d buttoned up his jacket. Even as he stood there, the first rays of the morning sun lit the hillside above him, showing the town houses along Queen’s Road all the way to the roofs of Newcastle town. Beyond that stood the castle’s marble dome—the Dome of the Lander.
It was another perfectly normal morning at the nether end of nowhere, all thanks to Pham Nuwen and the fungus that came down with the Lander. Bili knew the stories about the day Pham Nuwen raised the Slow Zone high, how the sun had gone dark and the packs had danced in madness. The surge this morning—Bili couldn’t see any evidence of it. Most likely he was the only person on this world who had noticed a thing. It had not been a grand change in the universe. It had been just a tiny slip back toward the natural equilibrium.
As Bili started the long walk to Newcastle, some of his frustration slipped away. Salvation had been snatched away at the last second, but this was a message. Rescue was on the way, and it would arrive sooner rather than later.
CHAPTER 25
“Escape by wriggling out sideways.” Amdi’s suggestion was much easier said than done. The wriggling began with a midnight sneak several kilometers closer to the sinister ‘X’ on Chitiratifor’s map. They forded the river at a fast-moving shallows, under a merciless rain. Once safely across, Ravna decided to be heartened by the weather. The storm might mask them from any enemy scouts. The clouds (probably) meant that Nevil’s orbiter could not see them. And the rain had swatted down the armies of gnats that had so enjoyed yesterday’s sunny warmth.
The path Amdi had found on the maps should eventually take them over mountain passes into another rift valley. The “Wild Principates” was one of the less geologically active rifts, but its name was a confession of ignorance. Its last valley-long blowup had occurred perhaps a thousand years earlier. Afterwards, settlers had trickled into the region, risking merely local catastrophes. Two hundred years ago, such an eruption in the northern part of the valley had suffocated every last member of Woodcarver’s colony there. Queen Woodcarver had a long memory for such things; she had not been back.