by Vernor Vinge
For ten seconds there was no more firing. Yet things were not completely silent. The slumped, glowing metal of his arm popped and sputtered as it cooled. High above, there was the susurrus of air escaping the hull. Fitful breezes whispered around ground level, making it impossible to keep position without constant tweaking at his jets. He paused, letting the current carry him silently out of his little valley. There. A ghostly hiss that was not his own. Another. The two were closing in on him from different directions. They might not know his exact position, but they could obviously coordinate their own.
The pain faded in and out, along with consciousness. Short pulses of agony and darkness. He dared not fool with more anesthetic. Pham saw frond tips peeping over a nearby hill. He halted, watched the fronds. Most likely, there was just enough vision area in the tips to sense motion… Two seconds passed. Pham’s last midge showed the other attacker floating silently in from the side. Any second now, the two would pop up. At that instant, Pham would have given anything for an armed midge. In all his stupid hacking, he’d never gotten around to that. No help for it. He waited for a moment of clear consciousness, long enough to boost over the enemy and shoot.
There was a rattle of fronds, loud self-announcement. Pham’s midge caught sight of Blueshell rolling behind slatted walls a hundred meters away. The Skroderider rushed from protection to protection, but always closer to Greenstalk’s position. And the rattling? Was it a pleading? Even after five months with the Riders, Pham had only the vaguest sense of their rattle-talk. Greenstalk—the Greenstalk who had always been the shy one, the compulsively honest one—rattled nothing back. She swung her beamer around, raking the slats with fire. The third Rider popped up just far enough to shoot at the slats. His angle would have been just right to fry Blueshell where he stood—except that the movement took him directly in front of Pham Nuwen’s gun.
Even as Pham fired, he was boosting out of his hole. Now was his only chance. If he could turn, fire back on Greenstalk before she was done with Blueshell—
The maneuver was an easy head-over-heels that should have left him upside down and facing back upon Greenstalk. But nothing was easy for him now, and Pham came around spinning too fast, the landscape dwindling beneath him. But there was Greenstalk all right, swinging her weapon back toward him.
And there was Blueshell, racing from between pillars that glowed white in the heat of Greenstalk’s fire. His voice was loud in Pham’s ear: “I beg, don’t kill her. Don’t kill—”
Greenstalk hesitated, then turned the weapon back on the advancing Blueshell. Pham triggered his gun, letting his spin drag the beam across the ground. Consciousness ebbed. Aim! Aim right! He furrowed the land below with a glowing, molten arrow, that ended at something dark and slumped. Blueshell’s tiny figure was still rolling across the wreckage, trying to reach her. Then Pham had turned too far and could not remember how to change the view. The sky swung slowly past his eyes:
A bluish moon with a sharp shadow ‘cross its middle. A ship floating close, with feathery spines, like some giant bug. What in the Qeng Ho … where am I?… and consciousness fled.
TWENTY-NINE
There were dreams. He’d lost a captaincy once again, been busted down to tending potted plants in the ship’s greenhouse. Sigh. Pham’s job was to water them and make them bloom. But then he noticed the pots had wheels and moved behind his back, waiting, softly rattling. What had been beautiful was now sinister. Pham had been willing to water and weed the creatures; he had always admired them.
Now he was the only one who knew they were the enemy of life.
More than once in his life, Pham Nuwen had wakened inside medical automation. He was almost used to coffin-close tanks, plain green walls, wires and tubes. This was different, and it took him a while to realize just where he was. Willowy trees bent close around him, swaying just a little in the warm breeze. He seemed to be lying on the softest moss, in a tiny glade above a pond. Summer haze hung in the air above the water. It was all very nice, except that the leaves were furry, and not quite the green of anything he had ever seen. This was someone else’s notion of home. He reached up toward the nearest branch, and his hand hit something unyielding just fifty centimeters above his face. A curved wall. For all the trick pictures, this was about the same size as the surgeons he remembered.
Something clicked behind his head; the idyll slid past him, taking its warm breeze with it. Somebody—Ravna—floated just beyond the cylinder. “Hi, Pham.” She reached past the surgeon’s hull to squeeze his hand. Her kiss was tremulous, and she looked haunted, as if she’d been crying a lot.
“Hi, yourself,” he said. Memory came back in jagged pieces. He tried to push off the bed, and found another similarity between this surgeon and ones of the Qeng Ho: he was securely plugged in.
Ravna laughed a little weakly. “Surgeon. Disconnect.” After a moment, Pham drifted free.
“It’s still holding my arm.”
“No, that’s the sling. Your left arm is going to take a while to regrow. It almost got burned off, Pham.”
“Oh.” He looked down at the white coccoon that meshed his arm against his side. He remembered the gunfight now … and realized that parts of his dream were deadly real. “How long have I been out?” The anxiety spilled into his voice.
“About thirty hours. We’re more than sixty light-years out from Harmonious Repose. We’re doing okay, except that now everyone in creation seems to be chasing us.”
The dream. His free hand clamped hard on Ravna’s arm. “The Skroderiders, where are they?”Not on board, pray the Fleet.
“W-what’s left of Greenstalk is in the other surgeon. Blueshell is—”
Why has he let me live? Pham’s eyes roved the room. They were in a utility cabin. Any weapons were at least twenty meters away. Hm. More important than guns: get command console privileges with the OOB… if it was not already too late. He pushed out of the surgeon and drifted out of the room.
Ravna followed. “Take it easy, Pham. You just came out of a surgeon.”
“What have they said about the shoot-out?”
“Poor Greenstalk’s not in a position to say anything, Pham. Blueshell says pretty much what you did: Greenstalk was grabbed by the rogue Riders, forced to lure you two into a trap.”
“Hmhm, hmhm,” Pham strove for a noncommittal tone. So maybe there was a chance; maybe Blueshell was not yet perverted. He continued his one-handed progress up the ship’s axis corridor. A minute later he was on the bridge, Ravna tagging behind.
“Pham. What’s the matter? There’s a lot we have to decide, but—”
How right you are. He dived onto the command deck, and made for the command console. “Ship. Do you recognize my voice?”
Ravna began, “Pham, What’s this—”
“Yes, sir.”
”—all about?”
“Command privileges,” he said. Capabilities granted while the Riders were ashore. Would they still be in place?
“Granted.”
The Skroderiders had had thirty hours to plan their defense. This was all too easy, too easy. “Suspend command privileges for the Skroderiders. Isolate them.”
“Yes, sir,” came the ship’s reply. Liar! But what more could he do? The sweep toward panic crested, and suddenly he felt very cool. He was Qeng Ho … and he was also godshatter.
Both Riders were in the same cabin, Greenstalk in the other copy of the ship’s surgeon. Pham opened a window on the room. Blueshell sat on a wall beside the surgeon. He looked wilted, as when they heard about Sjandra Kei. He angled his fronds at the video pickup. “Sir Pham. The ship tells me you’ve suspended our privileges?”
“What is going on, Pham?” Ravna had dug a foot into the floor, and stood glaring at him.
Pham ignored both questions. “How is Greenstalk doing?” he said.
The fronds turned away, seemed to become even more limp. “She lives… I thank you, Sir Pham. It took great skill to do what you did. Considering everything, I could
not have asked for more.”
What did I do? He remembered firing on Greenstalk. Had he pulled his aim? He looked inside the surgeon. This was quite different from the human configuration: This one was mostly water-filled, with turbulent aeration along the patient’s fronds. Asleep (?), Greenstalk looked frailer than he remembered, her fronds waving randomly in the water. Some were nicked, but her body seemed whole. His eyes traveled downwards toward the base of the stalk, where a Rider is normally attached to its skrode. The stump ended in a cloud of surgical tubing. And Pham remembered the last instant of the firefight, blasting the skrode out from under Greenstalk. What is a Rider like without anything to ride?
He pulled his eyes away from the wreckage. “I’ve deleted your command privileges because I don’t trust you.”My former friend, tool of my enemy.
Blueshell didn’t answer. After a moment Ravna spoke. “Pham. Without Blueshell, I’d never have gotten you out of that habitat. Even then—we were stuck in the middle of the RIP system. The shepherd satellite was screaming for our blood; they had figured out we were human. The Aprahanti were trying to break harbor and come down on us. Without Blueshell, we’d never have convinced local security to let us go ultra—we’d probably have been blown away the second we cleared the ring plane. We’d all be dead now, Pham.”
“Don’t you know what happened down there?”
Some of the indignation left Ravna’s face. “Yes. But understand about skrodes. They are a mechanical contrivance. It’s easy enough to disconnect the cyber part from the mechanical linkages. These guys were controlling the wheels, and aiming the gun.”
Hmm. On the window behind Ravna, he could see Blueshell standing with his fronds motionless, not rushing to agree. Triumphant? “That doesn’t explain Greenstalk’s sucking us in to the trap.” He raised a hand. “Yeah, I know, she was bludgeoned into doing it. Only problem, Ravna, she had no hesitation. She was enthusiastic, bubbly.” He stared over the woman’s shoulder. “She was under no compulsion, didn’t you tell me that, Blueshell.”
A long pause. Finally, “Yes, Sir Pham.”
Ravna turned, drifting back so she could see both of them. “But, but … it’s still absurd. Greenstalk has been with us from the beginning. A thousand times she could have destroyed the ship—or gotten word to the outside. Why chance this stupid ambush?”
“Yes. Why didn’t they betray us before…” Up until she asked the question, Pham had not known. He knew the facts, but had no coherent theory to hang them on. Now it all came together: the ambush, his dreams in the surgeon, even the paradoxes. “Maybe she wasn’t a traitor, before. We really did escape from Relay without pursuit, without anyone knowing of us, much less our exact destination. Certainly no one expected humans to show up at Harmonious Repose.” He paused, trying to get it all together. The ambush, “The ambush, it wasn’t stupid—but it was completely ad hoc. The enemy had no back up. Their weapons were dumb, simple things—”insight“—why, I’ll bet if you look at the wreckage of Greenstalk’s skrode you’ll find her beam gun was some sort of cutter tool. And the only sensor on the claymore mine was a motion detector: it had some civil use. All the gadgets were pulled together on very short notice by people who had not been expecting a fight. No, our enemy was very surprised by our appearance.”
“You think the Aprahanti could—”
“Not the Aprahanti. From what you said, they didn’t break moorage till after the gunfight, when the Rider moon started screaming about us. Whoever’s behind this is independent of the Butterflies, and must be spread in very small numbers across many star systems—a vast set of tripwires, listening for things of interest. They noticed us, and weak as their outpost was they tried to grab our ship. Only when we were getting away did they advertise us. One way or another, they didn’t want us to get away.” He jerked a hand at the ultratrace window. “If I read that right, we’ve got more than five hundred ships on our tail.”
Ravna’s eyes flicked to the display and back. Her voice was abstracted, “Yes. That’s part of the main Aprahanti fleet and … “
“There will be lots more, only they won’t all be Butterflies.”
“…what are you saying then? Why would Skroderiders wish us ill? A conspiracy is senseless. They’ve never had a nation state, much less an interstellar empire.”
Pham nodded. “Just peaceful settlements—like that shepherd moon—in polyspecific civilizations all across the Beyond.” His voice softened. “No, Rav, the Skroderiders are not the real enemy here … it’s the thing behind them. The Straumli Perversion.”
Incredulous silence, but he noticed how tightly Blueshell held his fronds now. That one knew.
“It’s the only explanation, Ravna. Greenstalk really was our friend, and loyal. My guess is that only a small minority of the Riders are under the Perversion’s control. When Greenstalk fell in with them she was converted too.”
“T-that’s impossible! This is the Middle of the Beyond, Pham. Greenstalk had courage, stubbornness. No brainwashing could have changed her so quickly.” A frightened desperation had come into her eyes. One explanation or another, some terrible thing must be true.
And I’m still here, alive and talking. A datum for godshatter; maybe there was yet a chance! He spoke almost as the understanding hit him. “Greenstalk was loyal, yet she was totally converted in seconds. It wasn’t just a perversion of her skrode, or some drug. It was as if both Rider and skrode had been designed from the beginning to respond.” He looked across at Blueshell, trying to gauge his reaction to what he would say next. “The Riders have awaited their creator a long time. Their race is very old, far older than anyone except the senescent. They’re everywhere, but in small numbers, always practical and peaceful. And somewhere in the beginning—a few billion years ago—their precursors were trapped in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Their creator built the first skrodes, and made the first Riders. Now I think we know the who and the why.
“Yes, yes. I know there have been other upliftings. What’s marvelous about this one is how stable it turned out to be. The greater skrodes are ‘tradition’ Blueshell says, but that’s a word I apply to cultures and to much shorter time scales. The greater skrodes of today are identical to ones a billion years ago. And they are devices that can be made anywhere in the Beyond … yet the design is clearly High Beyond or Transcendent.” That had been one of his earliest humiliations about the Beyond. He had looked at the design diagram—dissections really—of skrodes. On the outside, the thing was a mechanical device, with moving parts even. And the text claimed that the whole thing would be made with the simplest of factories, scarcely more than what existed in some places in the Slow Zone. And yet the electronics was a seemingly random mass of components, without any trace of hierarchical design or modularity. It worked, and far more efficiently than something designed by human-equivalent minds, but repair and debugging—of the cyber component—was out of the question. “No one in the Beyond understands all the potentials of skrodes, much less the adaptations forced on their Riders. Isn’t that so, Blueshell?”
The Rider clapped his fronds hard against his central stalk. Again a furious rattling. It was something Pham had never seen before. Rage? Terror? Blueshell’s voder voice was distorted with nonlinearities: “You ask? You ask? It’s monstrous to ask me to help you in this—” the voice skeetered into high frequencies and he stood mute, his body shivering.
Pham of the Qeng Ho felt a stab of shame. The other knew and understood … and deserved better than this. The Riders must be destroyed, but they should not have to listen to his judging. His hand swept toward the communications cutoff, stopped. No. This is your last chance to observe the Perversion’s … work.
Ravna’s glance snapped back and forth between human and Skroderider, and he could tell that she understood. Her face had the same stricken look as when she learned about Sjandra Kei. “You’re saying the Perversion made the original skrodes.”
“And modified the Riders too. It was long ago, and certainly no
t the same instance of the Perversion that the Straumers created, but…”
The “Blight”, that was the other common name for the Perversion, and closer to Old One’s view. For all the Perversion’s transcendence, its life style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces, across extraordinary reaches of time. It hid in archives, waiting for ideal conditions. And it had created helpers for its blooming…
He looked at Ravna, and suddenly realized a little more. “You’ve had thirty hours to think about this, Rav. You saw the record from my suit. Surely you must have guessed some of this.”
Her gaze dropped from his. “A little,” she finally said. At least she was no longer denying.
“You know what we have to do,” he said softly. Now that he understood what must be done, the godshatter eased its grip. Its will would be done.
“What is that?” said Ravna, as if she didn’t know.
“Two things: Post this to the Net.”
“Who would believe?” The Net of a Million Lies.
“Enough would. Once they look, most folk will be able to see the truth here … and take the proper action.”
Ravna shook her head. “No,” barely audible.
“The Net must be told, Ravna. We’ve discovered something that could save a thousand worlds. This is the Blight’s hidden edge,” at least in the Middle and Low Beyond.
She just shook her head again. “But screaming this truth would itself kill billions.”
“In honest defense!” He bounced slowly toward the ceiling, pushed himself back toward the deck.
There were tears in her eyes now. “These are exactly the arguments used to kill m-my family, my worlds… A-and I will not be part of it.”
“But the claims are true this time!”
“I’ve had enough of pogroms, Pham.”
Gentle toughness … and almost unbelievable. “You would make this decision yourself, Rav? We know something that others—leaders wiser than either of us—should be free to decide upon. You would keep them from making that choice?”