by Vernor Vinge
To Ravna the walls and floors were heavy timber, rough cut. People like Egravan saw stone walls and narrow tunnels—the sort of broodery his race had maintained on new conquests of long ago. The trickery was optical—not some mental smudging—and about the best that could be done in the Middle Beyond.
Ravna and Pham walked between widely-spaced tables. The owners weren’t as successful with sound as with vision: the music was faint and changed from table to table. Smells changed too, and were a little bit harder to take. Air management was working hard to keep everyone healthy, if not completely comfortable. Tonight the place was crowded. At the far end of the service floor, the special-atmosphere nooks were occupied: low pressure, high pressure, high NOx, aquaria. Some customers were vague blurs within turbid atmospheres.
In some ways it might have been a port bar at Sjandra Kei. Yet … this was Relay. It attracted High Beyonders who would never come to backwaters like Sjandra Kei. Most of the High Ones didn’t look very strange; civilizations at the Top were most often just colonies from below. But the headbands she saw here were not jewelry. Mind-computer links aren’t efficient in the Middle Beyond, but most of the High Beyonders would not give them up. Ravna started toward a group of banded tripods and their machines. Let Pham Nuwen talk with creatures who teetered on the edge of transsapience.
Surprisingly, he touched her arm, drawing her back. “Let’s walk around a little more.” He was looking all around the hall, as if searching for a familiar face. “Let’s find some other humans first.”
When holes showed in Pham Nuwen’s cram-education, they were gapingly wide. Ravna tried to keep her face serious. “Other humans? We’re all there is at Relay, Pham.”
“But the friends you’ve been telling me about … Egravan, Sarale?”
Ravna just shook her head. For a moment the barbarian looked vulnerable.
Pham Nuwen had spent his life crawling at sublight between human-colonized star systems. She knew that in all that life he had seen only three non-human races. Now he was lost in a sea of alienness. She kept her sympathy to herself; this one insight might affect the guy more than all her arguing.
But the instant passed, and he was smiling again. “Even more an adventure.” They left the main floor and walked past special-atmosphere nooks. “Lord, but Qeng Ho would love this.”
No humans anywhere, and The Wandering Company was the homiest meeting place she knew; many Org customers met only on the Net. She felt her own homesickness welling up. On the second floor, a signet flag caught her eye. She’d known something like it back at Sjandra Kei. She drew Pham Nuwen across the floor, and started up the timbered stairs.
Out of the background murmur, she heard a high-pitched twittering. It wasn’t Triskweline, but the words made sense! By the Powers, it was Samnorsk: “I do believe it’s a Homo Sap! Over here, my lady.” She followed the sound to the table with the signet flag.
“May we sit with you?” she asked, savoring the familiar language.
“Please do.” The twitterer looked like a small ornamental tree sitting in a six-wheeled cart. The cart was marked with cosmetic stripes and tassels; its 150-by-120-centimeter topside was covered with a cargo scarf in the same pattern as the signet flag. The creature was a Greater Skroderider. Its race traded through much of the Middle Beyond, including Sjandra Kei. The Skroderider’s high-pitched voice came from its voder. But speaking Samnorsk, it sounded homier than anything she’d heard in a long time. Even granting the mental peculiarities of Skroderiders, she felt a surge of affectionate nostalgia, as if she had run into a old classmate in a far city.
“My name is—” the sound was the rustling of fronds, “but you can easier call me Blueshell. It’s nice to see a familiar face, hahaha.” Blueshell spoke the laughter as words. Pham Nuwen had sat down with Ravna, but he understood not a word of Samnorsk and so the great reunion was lost on him. The Rider switched to Triskweline and introduced his four companions: another Skroderider, and three humanoids who seemed to like the shadows. None of the humanoids spoke Samnorsk, but no one was more than one translator hop from Triskweline.
The Skroderiders were owners/operators of a small interstellar freighter, the Out of Band II. The humanoids were certificants for part of the starship’s current cargo. “My mate and I have been in the business almost two hundred years. We have happy feelings for your race, my lady. Our first runs were between Sjandra Kei and Forste Utgrep. Your people are good customers and we scarcely ever have a shipment rot…” He wheeled his skrode back from the table and then drove forward—the equivalent of a small bow.
All was not sweetness and light, however. One of the humanoids spoke. The sounds could almost have come from a human throat, though they made no sense. A moment passed as the house translator processed his words. Then the broach on his jacket spoke in clear Triskweline: “Blueshell states you are Homo sapiens. Know that you have our animosity. We are bankrupt, near-stranded here by your race’s evil creation. The Straumli Perversion.” The words sounded emotionless, but Ravna could see the creature’s tense posture, its fingers twisting at a drink bulb.
Considering his attitude, it probably wouldn’t help to point out that though she was human, Sjandra Kei was thousands of light-years from Straum. “You came here from the Realm?” she asked the Skroderider.
Blueshell didn’t answer immediately. That’s the way it was with his race; he was probably trying to remember who she was and what they were all talking about. Then: “Yes, yes. Please do excuse my certificants’ hostility. Our main cargo is a one-time cryptographic pad. The source is Commercial Security at Sjandra Kei; the destination is the certificants’ High colony. It was the usual arrangement: We’re carrying a one-third xor of the pad. Independent shippers are carrying the others. At the destination, the three parts would be xor’d together. The result could supply a dozen worlds’ crypto needs on the Net for—”
Downstairs there was a commotion. Someone was smoking something a bit too strong for the air scrubbers. Ravna caught a whiff, enough to shimmer her vision. It had knocked out several patrons on the main level. Management was counseling the offending customer. Blueshell made an abrupt noise. He backed his skrode from the table and rolled to the railing. “Don’t want to be caught unawares. Some people can be so abrupt…” When nothing more came of the incident, he returned. “Uh, where was I?” He was silent a moment, consulting the short-term memory built into his skrode. “Yes, yes… We would become relatively rich if our plans work out. Unfortunately, we stopped on Straum to drop off some bulk data.” He pivoted on his rear four wheels. “Surely that was safe? Straum is more than a hundred light-years from their lab in the Transcend. Yet—”
One of the certificants interrupted with loud gabble. The house translator kicked in a moment later: “Yes. It should have been safe. We saw no violence. Ship’s recorders show that our safeness was not breached. Yet now there are rumors. Net groups claim that Straumli Realm is owned by perversion. Absurdity. Yet these rumors have crossed the Net to our destination. Our cargo is not trusted, so our cargo is ruined: now it is only a few grams of data medium carrying random—” In the middle of the flat-voiced translation, the humanoid lunged out of the shadows. Ravna had a glimpse of a jaw edged with razor-sharp gums. He threw his drink bulb at the table in front of her.
Pham Nuwen’s hand flashed out, snatching the drink before it hit—before she had quite realized what was happening. The redhead came slowly to his feet. From the shadows, the two other humanoids came to their feet and moved toward their friend. Pham Nuwen didn’t say a word. He set the bulb carefully down and leaned just slightly toward the other, his hands relaxed yet bladelike. Cheap fiction talks about “looks of deadly menace”. Ravna had never expected to see the real thing. But the humanoids saw it too. They tugged their friend gently back from the table. The loudmouth did not resist, but once beyond Pham’s reach he erupted in a barrage of squeals and hisses that left the house translator speechless. He made a sharp gesture with three fingers, a
nd shut up. The three swept silently down the stairs and away.
Pham Nuwen sat down, his gray eyes calm and untroubled. Maybe he did have something to be arrogant about! Ravna looked across at the two Skroderiders. “I’m sorry your cargo lost value.”
Most of Ravna’s past contacts had been with Lesser Skroderiders, whose reflexes were only slightly augmented beyond their sessile heritage. Had these two even noticed the interruption? But Blueshell answered immediately, “Do not apologize. Ever since our arrival, those three have been complaining. Contract partners or not, I’m very tired of them.” He lapsed into potted-plant mode.
After a moment, the other Rider—Greenstalk, was it?—spoke. “Besides, our commercial situation may not be a complete failure. I am sure the other thirds of the shipment went nowhere near Straumli Realm.” That was the usual procedure anyway: each part of the shipment was carried by a different company, each taking a very different path. If the other thirds could be certified, the crew of the Out of Band might not come away empty-handed. “In—in fact, there may be a way we can get full certification. True, we were at Straumli Main, but—”
“How long ago did you leave?”
“Six hundred and fifty hours ago. About two hundred hours after they dropped off the Net.”
It suddenly dawned on Ravna that she was talking to something like eyewitnesses. After thirty days, the Threats news was still dominated by the events at Straum. The consensus was that a Class Two perversion had been created—even Vrinimi Org believed that. Yet it was still mainly guesswork… And here she was talking to beings who had actually been there. “You don’t think the Straumers created a perversion?”
It was Blueshell who replied. “Sigh,” he said. “Our certificants deny it, but I see a problem of conscience here. We did witness strangeness on Straum… Have you ever encountered artificial immune systems? The ones that work in the Middle Beyond are more trouble than they’re worth, so perhaps not. I noticed a real change in certain officers of the Crypto Authority right after the Straumli victory. It was as if they were suddenly part of a poorly calibrated automation, as if they were somebody’s, um, fingers… No one can doubt they were playing in the Transcend. They found something up there; a lost archive. But that is not the point.” He stopped talking for a long moment; Ravna almost thought he was finished. “You see, just before leaving Straumli Main, we—”
But now Pham Nuwen was talking too. “That’s something I’ve been wondering about. Everybody talks as though this Straumli Realm was doomed the moment they began research in the Transcend. Look. I’ve played with bugged software and strange weapons. I know you can get killed that way. But it looks like the Straumers were careful to put their lab far away. They were building something that could go very wrong, but apparently it was a previously-tried experiment—like just about everything Up Here. They could stop the work any time it deviated from the records, right up to the end. So how could they screw up so bad?”
The question stopped the Skroderider in its tracks. You didn’t need a doctorate in Applied Theology to know the answer. Even the damn Straumers should have known the answer. But given Pham Nuwen’s background, it was a reasonable question. Ravna kept her mouth shut. The Skroderider’s very alienness might be more convincing to Pham than another lecture from her.
Blueshell dithered for a moment, no doubt using his skrode to help assemble his arguments. When he finally spoke, he didn’t seem irritated by the interruption. “I hear several misconceptions, My Lady Pham.” He seemed to use the old Nyjoran honorific pretty indiscriminately. “Have you been into the archive at Relay?”
Pham said yes. Ravna guessed he’d never been past the beginners’ front end.
“Then you know that an archive is a fundamentally vaster thing than the database on a conventional local net. For practical purposes the big ones can’t even be duplicated. The major archives go back millions of years, have been maintained by hundreds of different races—most now extinct or Transcended into Powers. Even the archive at Relay is a jumble, so huge that indexing systems are laid on top of indexing systems. Only in the Transcend could such a mass be well organized and even then only the Powers could understand it.”
“So?”
“There are thousands of archives in the Beyond—tens of thousands if you count the ones that have fallen into disrepair or dropped off the Net. Along with unending trivia, they contain important secrets and important lies. There are traps and snares.” Millions of races played with the advice that filtered unsolicited across the Net. Tens of thousands had been burned thereby. Sometimes the damage was relatively minor, good inventions that weren’t quite right for the target environment. Sometimes it was malicious, viruses that would jam a local net so thoroughly that a civilization must restart from scratch. Where-Are-They-Now and Threats carried stories of worse tragedies: planets kneedeep in replicant goo, races turned brainless by badly programmed immune systems.
Pham Nuwen was wearing his skeptical expression. “Just test the stuff at a safe remove. Be prepared for local disasters.”
That would have brought most explanations to a stop. Ravna had to admire the Skroderider: he paused, retreated to still more elementary terms. “True, simple caution can prevent many disasters. And if your lab is in the Middle or Low Beyond, such caution is all that is really needed—no matter how sophisticated the threat. But we all understand the nature of the Zones…” Ravna had virtually no feel for Rider body language, but she would have sworn that Blueshell was watching the barbarian expectantly, trying to gauge the depth of Pham’s ignorance.
The human nodded impatiently.
Blueshell continued, “In the Transcend, truly sophisticated equipment can operate, devices substantially smarter than anyone down here. Of course, almost any economic or military competition can be won by the side with superior computing resources. Such can be had at the Top of the Beyond and in the Transcend. Races are always migrating there, hoping to build their utopias. But what do you do when your new creations may be smarter than you are? It happens that there are limitless possibilities for disaster, even if an existing Power does not cause harm. So there are unnumbered recipes for safely taking advantage of the Transcend. Of course they can’t be effectively examined except in the Transcend. And run on devices of their own description, the recipes themselves become sentient.”
Understanding was beginning to glimmer across Pham Nuwen’s face.
Ravna leaned forward, caught the redhead’s attention. “There are complex things in the archives. None of them is sentient, but some have the potential, if only some naive young race will believe their promises. We think that’s what happened to Straumli Realm. They were tricked by documentation that claimed miracles, tricked into building a transcendent being, a Power—but one that victimizes sophonts in the Beyond.” She didn’t mention how rare such perversion was. The Powers were variously malevolent, playful, indifferent—but virtually all of them had better uses for their time than exterminating cockroaches in the wild.
Pham Nuwen rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “Okay, I guess I see. But I get the feeling this is common knowledge. If it’s this deadly, how did the Straumli bunch get taken in?”
“Bad luck and criminal incompetence,” the words popped out of her with surprising force. She hadn’t realized she was so bent by the Straumli thing; somewhere inside, her old feelings for Straumli Realm were still alive. “Look. Operations in the High Beyond and in the Transcend are dangerous. Civilizations up there don’t last long, but there will always be people who try. Very few of the threats are actively evil. What happened to the Straumers… They ran across this recipe advertising wondrous treasure. Quite possibly it had been lying around for millions of years, a little too risky for other folks to try. You’re right, the Straumers knew the dangers.” But it was a classic situation of balancing risks and choosing wrong. Perhaps a third of Applied Theology was about how to dance near the flame without getting incinerated. No one knew the details of the Straumli debacle
, but she could guess them from a hundred similar cases:
“So they set up a base in the Transcend at this lost archive—if that’s what it was. They began implementing the schemes they found. You can be sure they spent most of their time watching it for signs of deception. No doubt the recipe was a series of more or less intelligible steps with a clear takeoff point. The early stages would involve computers and programs more effective than anything in the Beyond—but apparently well-behaved.”
“…Yeah. Even in the Slowness, a big program can be full of surprises.”
Ravna nodded. “And some of these would be near or beyond human complexity. Of course, the Straumers would know this and try to isolate their creations. But given a malign and clever design … it should be no surprise if the devices leaked onto the lab’s local net and distorted the information there. From then on, the Straumer’s wouldn’t have a chance. The most cautious staffers would be framed as incompetent. Phantom threats would be detected, emergency responses demanded. More sophisticated devices would be built, and with fewer safeguards. Conceivably, the humans were killed or rewritten before the Perversion even achieved transsapience.”
There was a long silence. Pham Nuwen looked almost chastened. Yeah. There’s a lot you don’t know, Buddy. Think on what Old One might have planned for you.
Blueshell bent a tendril to taste a brown concoction that smelled like seaweed. “Well told, My Lady Ravna. But there is one difference in the present situation. It may be good fortune, and very important… You see, just before leaving Straumli Main, we attended a beach party among the Lesser Riders. They had been little affected by events to that point; many hadn’t even noticed the destruction of independence at Straum. With luck, they may be the last enslaved.” His squeaky voice lowered an octave, trailing into silence. “Where was I? Yes, the party. There was one fellow there, a bit more lively than the average. Somewhere years past, he had bonded with a traveler in a Straumli news service. Now he was acting as a clandestine data drop, so humble that he wasn’t even listed in that service’s own net…