by Vernor Vinge
Grondr rubbed a hand absently across his eye freckles. “Yes, an expected disappointment. We’re at the limits of information management with this expansion. Egravan and Derche—” those were Ravna’s boss and boss’s boss “—are quite happy with your progress. You came well educated, and learned fast. I think there’s a place for humans in the Organization.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ravna blushed. Grondr’s assessment was casually spoken but very important to her. And it would probably mean the arrival of more humans, perhaps even before her ‘prenticeship was up. So was this the reason for the interview?
She tried not to stare at the other. She was quite used to the Vrinimi majority race by now. From a distance the Kalir looked humanoid. Up close, the differences were substantial. The race was descended from something like an insect. In upsizing, evolution had necessarily moved reinforcing struts inside the body, till the outside was a combination of grublike skin and sheets of pale chitin. At first glance Grondr was an unremarkable exemplar of the race. But when the fellow moved, even to adjust his jacket or scratch at his eye freckles, there was a strange precision to him. Egravan said that he was very, very old.
Grondr changed the subject with the clickety abruptness. “You are aware of the … changes at Straumli Realm?”
“You mean the fall of Straum? Yes.”Though I’m surprised you are. Straumli Realm was a significant human civilization, but it accounted for only an infinitesimal fraction of Relay’s message traffic.
“Please accept my sympathy.” Despite the cheerful announcements from Straum, it was clear that absolute disaster had befallen Straumli Realm. Almost every race eventually dabbled in the Transcend, more often than not becoming a superintelligence, a Power. But it was clear by now that the Straumers had created, or awakened, a Power of deadly inclination. Their fate was as terrible as anything Ravna’s father had ever predicted. And their bad luck was now a disaster that stretched across all that had been Straumli Realm. Grondr continued: “Will this news affect your work?”
Curiouser and curiouser; she would have sworn the other was coming to the point. Maybe this was the point? “Uh, no sir. The Straumli affair is a terrible thing, especially for humankind. But my home is Sjandra Kei. Straumli Realm is our offspring, but I have no relatives there.”Though I might have been there if it hadn’t been for Mother and Dad. Actually, when Straumli Main dropped off the Net, Sjandra Kei had been unreachable for almost forty hours. That had bothered her very much, since any rerouting should have been immediate. Communication was eventually established; the problem had been screwed-up routing tables on an alternate path. Ravna had even shot half a year’s savings for an over-and-back mailing. Lynne and her parents were fine; the Straumli debacle was the news of the century for folks at Sjandra Kei, but it was still a disaster at great remove. Ravna wondered if parents had ever given better advice than hers!
“Good, good.” His mouth parts moved in the analog of a human nod. His head tilted so only peripheral freckles were looking at her; the guy actually seemed hesitant! Ravna looked back silently. Grondr ‘Kalir might be the strangest exec in the Org. He was the only one whose principal residence was Groundside. Officially he was in charge of a division of the archives; in fact, he ran Vrinimi Marketing (i.e., Intelligence). There were stories that he had visited the Top of the Beyond; Egravan claimed he had an artificial immune system. “You see, the Straumli disaster has incidentally made you one of the Organization’s most valuable employees.”
“I … don’t understand.”
“Ravna, the rumors in the Threats newsgroup are true. The Straumers had a laboratory in the Low Transcend. They were playing with recipes from some lost archive, and they created a new Power. It appears to be a Class Two perversion.”
The Known Net recorded a Class Two perversion about once a century. Such Powers had a normal “lifespan”—about ten years. But they were explicitly malevolent, and in ten years could do enormous damage. Poor Straum.
“So you can see there’s enormous potential for profit or loss here. If the disaster spreads, we will lose network customers. On the other hand, everyone around Straumli Realm wants to track what is happening. This could increase our message traffic by several percent.”
Grondr put it more cold-bloodedly than she liked, but he had a point. In fact, the opportunity for profit was directly linked with mitigating the perversion. If she hadn’t been so wrapped up in archive work, she’d have guessed all this. And now that she did think about it: “There are even more spectacular opportunities. Historically, these perversions have been of interest to other Powers. They’ll want Net feeds and … information about the creating race.” Her voice guttered into silence as she finally understood the reason for this meeting.
Grondr’s mouth parts clicked agreement. “Indeed. We at Relay are well-placed to supply news to the Transcend. And we also have our own human. In the last three days we’ve received several dozen queries from civilizations in the High Beyond, some claiming to represent Powers. This interest could mean a large increase in Organization income through the next decade.
“All this you could read in the Threats news group. But there is another item, something I ask you to keep secret for now: Five days ago, a ship from the Transcend entered our region. It claims to be directly controlled by a Power.” The wall behind him became a window upon the visitor. The craft was an irregular collection of spines and limps. A scale bar claimed the thing was only five meters across.
Ravna felt the hair on her neck prickling. Here in the Middle Beyond they should be relatively safe from the caprice of the Powers. Still … the visit was an unnerving thing. “What does it want?”
“Information about the Straumli perversion. In particular, it is very interested in your race. It would give a great deal to take back a living human…”
Ravna’s response was abrupt. “I’m not interested.”
Grondr spread his pale hands. The light glittered from the chitin on the back of his fingers. “It would be an enormous opportunity. A ‘prenticeship with the gods. This one has promised to establish an oracle here in return.”
“No!” Ravna half rose from her chair. She was one human, more than twenty thousand light-years from home. That had been a frightening thing in the first days of her ‘prenticeship. Since then she had made friends, had learned more of Organization ethics, had come to trust these folk almost as much as people at Sjandra Kei. But … there was only one halfway trustable oracle on the Net these days, and it was almost ten years old. This Power was tempting Vrinimi Org with fabulous treasure.
Grondr clicked embarrassment. He waved her back to her chair. “It was only a suggestion. We do not abuse our employees. If you will simply serve as our local expert…”
Ravna nodded.
“Good. Frankly, I had not expected you to accept the offer. We have a much more likely volunteer, but one who needs coaching.”
“A human? Here?” Ravna had a standing query in the local directory for other humans. During the last two years she had seen three, and they had just been passing through. “How long has she—he?—been here?”
Grondr said something halfway between a smile and a laugh. “A bit more than a century, though we didn’t realize it until a few days ago.” The pictures around him shifted. Ravna recognized Relay’s “attic,” the junkyard of abandoned ships and freight devices that floated just a thousand light-seconds from the archives. “We receive a lot of one-way freight, items shipped in the hope we’ll buy or sell on consignment.” The view closed on a decrepit vessel, perhaps two hundred meters long, wasp-waisted to support a ramscoop drive. Its ultradrive spines were scarcely more than stubs.
“A bottom-lugger?” said Ravna.
Grondr clicked negation. “A dredge. The ship is about thirty thousand years old. Most of that time was spent in a deep penetration of the Slow Zone, plus ten thousand years in the Unthinking Depths.”
Up close now, she could see the hull was finely pitted, the result of millen
nia of relativistic erosion. Even unpiloted, such expeditions were rare: a deep penetration could not return to the Beyond within the lifetime of its builders. Some would not return within the lifetime of the builders’race. People who launched such missions were just a little weird; People who recovered them could make a solid profit.
“This one came from very far away, even if it’s not quite a jackpot mission. It didn’t see anything interesting in the Unthinking Depths—not surprising given that even simple automation fails there. We sold most of the cargo immediately. The rest we cataloged and forgot … till the Straumli affair.” The starscape vanished. They were looking at a medical display, random limbs and body parts. They looked very human. “In a solar system at the bottom of the Slowness, the dredge found a derelict. The wreck had no ultradrive capability; it was truly a Slow Zone design. The solar system was uninhabited. We speculate the ship had a structural failure—or perhaps the crew was affected by the Depths. Either way, they ended up in a frozen mangle.”
Tragedy at the bottom of the Slowness, thousands of years ago. Ravna forced her eyes from the carnage. “You figure on selling this to our visitor?”
“Even better. Once we started poking around, we discovered a substantial error in the cataloging. One of the deaders is almost intact. We patched it up with parts from the others. It was expensive, but we ended up with a living human.” The picture flickered again, and Ravna caught her breath. In the medical animation, the parts floated into an orderly arrangement. There was a complete body there, torn up a little in the belly. Pieces came togther, and … this was no “she”. He floated whole and naked, as if in sleep. Ravna had no doubt of his humanity, but all humankind in the Beyond was descended from Nyjoran stock. This fellow had none of that heritage. The skin was smoky gray, not brown. The hair was bright reddish brown, a color she had only seen in pre-Nyjoran histories. The bones of the face were subtly different from modern humans. The small differences were more jarring than the outright alienness of her coworkers.
Now the figure was clothed. Under other circumstances, Ravna would have smiled. Grondr ‘Kalir had picked an absurd costume, something from the Nyjoran era. The figure bore a sword and slug gun… A sleeping prince from the Age of Princesses.
“Behold the Ur-human,” said Grondr.
SEVEN
“Relay” is a common place-name. It has meaning in almost any environment. Like Newtown and Newhome, it occurs over and over when people move or colonize or participate in a communication net. You could travel a billion light-years or a billion years and still find such names among folk of natural intelligence.
But in the current era there was one instance of “Relay” known above all others. That instance appeared in the routing list of two percent of all traffic across the Known Net. Twenty thousand light-years off the galactic plane, Relay had an unobstructed line of sight on thirty percent of the Beyond, including many star systems right at the bottom, where starships can make only one light-year per day. A few metal-bearing solar systems were equally well-placed, and there was competition. But where other civilizations lost interest, or colonized into the Transcend, or died in apocalypse, Vrinimi Organization lasted. After fifty thousand years, there were several races of the original Org in its membership. None of those were still leaders—yet the original viewpoint and policies remained. Position and durability: Relay was now the main intermediate to the Magellanics, and one of the few sites with any sort of link to the Beyond in Sculptor.
At Sjandra Kei, Relay’s reputation had been fabulous. In her two years of ‘prenticeship, Ravna had come to realize that the truth exceeded the reputation. Relay was in Middle Beyond; the Organization’s only export was the relay function and access to the local archive. Yet they imported the finest biologicals and processing equipment from the High Beyond. The Relay Docks were an extravagance that only the absolutely rich could indulge. They stretched a thousand kilometers: bays, repair holds, transhipment centers, parks, and playgrounds. Even at Sjandra Kei there were habitats far larger. But the Docks were in no orbit. They floated a thousand kilometers above Groundside on the largest agrav frame Ravna had ever seen. At Sjandra Kei the annual income of an academician might pay for a square meter of agrav fabric—junk that might not last a year. Here there were millions of hectares of the stuff, supporting billions of tonnes. Just replacements for dead fabric required more High Beyond commerce than most star clusters could command.
And now I have my own office here. Working directly for Grondr ‘Kalir had its perks. Ravna kicked back in her chair and stared across the central sea. At the Docks’ altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above.
She had the surf cranked up this morning—an easy matter of flexing the agravs of the basin. It made a regular crashing against her beach. Even thirty meters from the water there was a tang of salt in the air. Rows of white tops marched off into the distance.
She eyed the figure that was trudging slowly up the beach toward her. Just a few weeks ago she would never have dreamed this situation. Just a few weeks ago she had been out at the archive, absorbed in the upgrade work, happy to be involved with one of the largest databases on the Known Net. Now … it was almost as if she had come full circle, back to her childhood dreams of adventure. the only problem was, sometimes she felt like one of the bad guys: Pham Nuwen was a living person, not something to be sold.
She stood and walked out to meet her red-haired visitor.
He wasn’t carrying the sword and handgun of Grondr’s fanciful animation. Yet his clothes were the braided fabric of ancient adventure, and he carried himself with lazy confidence. Since her meeting with Grondr, she had looked up some anthropology from Old Earth. The red hair and the eyefolds had been known there, though rarely in the same individual. Certainly his smoky skin would have been remarkable to an inhabitant of Earth. This fellow was, as much as herself, a product of post-terrestrial evolution.
He stopped an arm’s length away and gave her a lopsided grin. “You look pretty human. Ravna Bergsndot?”
She smiled and nodded up at him. “Mr. Pham Nuwen?”
“Yes indeed. We seem both to be excellent guessers.” He swept past her into the shade of the inner office. Cocky fellow.
She followed him, unsure about protocol. You’d think with a fellow human there would be no problems…
Actually, the interview went pretty smoothly. It was more than thirty days since Pham Nuwen’s resuscitation. Much of that time had been spent in cram language sessions. The fellow must be damned bright; he already spoke Triskweline trade talk with a folksy slickness. He really was rather cute. Ravna had been away from Sjandra Kei for two years, and had another year of her ‘prenticeship to go. She’d been doing pretty well. She had many close friends here, Egravan, Sarale. But just chatting with this fellow brought a lot of the loneliness back. In some ways he was more alien than anything at Relay … and in some ways she wanted to just grab him and kiss his confident grin away.
Grondr Vrinimikalir had been telling the truth about Pham Nuwen. The guy was actually enthusiastic about the Org’s plans for him! In theory, that meant she could do her job with a clear conscience. In fact…
“Mr. Nuwen, my job is to orient you to your new world. I know you’ve been exposed to some intense instruction the last few days, but there are limits to how fast such knowledge can sink in.”
The redhead smiled. “Call me Pham. Sure, I feel like an over-stuffed bag. My sleep time is full of little voices. I’ve learned an awful lot without experiencing anything. Worse, I’ve been a target for all this ‘education’. It’s a perfect setup if Vrinimi wants to trick me. That’s why I’m learning to use the local library. And that’s why I insisted they find someone like you.” He saw the surprise on her face. “Ha! You
didn’t know that. See, talking to a real person gives me a chance to see things that aren’t all planned ahead. Also, I’ve always been a pretty good judge of human nature; I think I can read you pretty well.” His grin showed he understood just how irritating he was being.
Ravna looked up at the green petals of the beachtrees. Maybe this boob deserved what he was getting into. “So you have great experience dealing with people?”
“Given the limitations of the Slowness, I’ve been around, Ravna. I’ve been around. I know I don’t look it, but I’m sixty-seven years old subjective. I thank your Organization for a fine job of thawing me out.” He tipped a non-existent hat in her direction. “My last voyage was more than a thousand years objective. I was Programmer-at-Arms on a Qeng Ho longshot—” His eyes abruptly widened, and he said something unintelligible. For a moment he almost looked vulnerable.
Ravna reached a hand toward him. “Memory?”
Pham Nuwen nodded. “Damn. This is something I don’t thank you people for.”
Pham Nuwen had been frozen in the aftermath of violent death, not as a planned suspension. It was a near miracle that Vrinimi Org had been able to bring him back at all—at least with Middle Beyond technology. But memory was the hardest thing. The chemical basis of memory does not survive chaotic freezing well.
The problem was enough to shrink even Pham Nuwen’s ego by a size or two. Ravna took pity on him. “It’s not likely that anything is completely lost. You just have to find a different angle on some things.”
“…Yes. I’ve been coached about that. Start with other memories; work sideways toward what you can’t remember straight on. Well … it beats being dead.” Some of his jauntiness returned, but subdued to a really quite charming level. They talked for long while as the redhead worked around the points he couldn’t “remember straight on”.