eavesdropping, and she’d already told Grondr her misgivings about this “selling” of a sophont. Nevertheless, she was a bit nervous to see him.
“When is he actually going to leave for the Transcend?”
Grondr rubbed at his freckles. He didn’t seem angry. “Not for ten or twenty days. The Power that’s negotiating for him is more interested in looking at our archives and watching what’s passing through Relay. Also… despite the human’s enthusiasm for going, he’s really quite cautious.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. He’s insisting on a library budget, and permission to roam anywhere in the system. He’s been chatting with random employees all over the Docks. He was especially insistent about talking to you.” Grondr’s mouth parts clicked in a smile. “Feel free to speak your mind to him. Basically, he’s tasting around for hidden poison. Hearing the worst from you should make him trust us.”
She was coming to understand Grondr’s confidence. Damn but Pham Nuwen had a thick head. “Yes sir. He’s asked me to show him around the Foreign Quarter tonight.” As you well know.
“Fine. I wish the rest of the deal were going as smoothly.” Grondr turned so that only peripheral freckles were looking in her direction. He was surrounded by status displays of the Org’s communication and database operations. From what she could see, things were remarkably busy. “Maybe I should not bring this up, but it’s just possible you can help… Business is very brisk.” Grondr did not seem pleased to report the good news. “We have nine civilizations from the Top of the Beyond that are bidding for wide band data feeds. That we could handle. But this Power that sent a ship here…”
Ravna interrupted almost without thinking, a breach that would have horrified her a few days earlier. “Just who is it, by the way? Any chance we’re entertaining the Straumli Perversion?” The thought of that taking the redhead was a chill.
“Not unless all the Powers are fooled, too. Marketing calls our current visitor ‘Old One’.” He smiled. “That’s something of a joke, but true even so. We’ve known it for eleven years.” No one really knew how long Transcendent beings lived, but it was a rare Power that stayed communicative for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something different—or really did die. There were a million explanations, thousands that were allegedly from the Powers first hand. Ravna guessed that the true explanation was the simplest one: intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change. Dumb animals can change only as fast as natural evolution. Human equivalent races, once on their technological run-up, hit the limits of their zone in a matter of a few thousand years. In the Transcend, superhumanity can happen so fast that its creators are destroyed. It wasn’t surprising then that the Powers themselves were evanescent.
So calling an eleven-year Power “Old One” was almost reasonable.
“We believe that Old One is a variant on the Type 73 pattern. Such are rarely malicious—and we know from whom it Transcended. Just now it’s causing us major discomfort, though. For twenty days it has been monopolizing an enormous and increasing percentage of Relay bandwidth. Since its ship arrived, it’s been all over the archive and our local nets. We’ve asked Old One to send noncritical data by starship, but it refuses. This afternoon was the worst yet. Almost five percent of Relay’s capacity was bound up in its service. And the creature is sending almost as much downlink as it is receiving uplink.”
That was weird, but, “It’s still paying for the business, isn’t it? If Old One can pay top price, why do you care?”
“Ravna, we hope our Organization will be around for many years after the Old One is gone. There is nothing it could offer us that would be good through all that time.” Ravna nodded. Actually, there were certain “magic” automations that might work down here, but their long-term effectiveness would be dubious. This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course. “Old One can easily top any bid from the Middle Beyond. But if we give it all the services it demands, we’ll be effectively nonfunctional to the rest of our customers—and they are the people we must depend on in the future.”
His image was replaced by an archive access report. Ravna was very familiar with the format, and Grondr’s complaint really hit home. The Known Net was a vast thing, a hierarchical anarchy that linked hundreds of millions of worlds. Yet even the main trunks had bandwidths like something out of Earth’s dawn age; a wrist dataset could do better on a local net. That’s why bulk access to the Archive was mostly local—to media freighters visiting the Relay system. But now… during the last hundred hours, remote access to the Archive, both by volume and by count, had been higher than local! And ninety percent of those accesses were from a single account—Old One’s.
Grondr’s voice continued from behind the graphics. “We’ve got one backbone transceiver dedicated to this Power right now… Frankly, we can’t tolerate this for more than a few days; the ultimate expense is just too great.”
Grondr’s face was back on the display. “Anyway, I think you can see that the deal for the barbarian is really the least of our problems. The last twenty days have brought more income than the last two years—far more than we can verify and absorb. We’re endangered by our own success.” He made an ironic smile-frown.
They talked a few minutes about Pham Nuwen, and then Grondr rang off. Afterwards, Ravna took a walk along her beach. The sun was well down toward the aft horizon, and the sand was just pleasantly warm against her feet; the Docks went round the planet once every twenty hours, circling the pole at about forty degrees north latitude. She walked close to the surf, where the sand was flat and wet. The mist off the sea was moist against her skin. The blue sky just above the white-tops shaded quickly to indigo and black. Specks of silver moved up there, agrav floaters bringing starships into the Docks. The whole thing was so fabulously, unnecessarily expensive. Ravna was by turns grossed out and bedazzled. Yet after two years at Relay, she was beginning to see the point. Vrinimi Org wanted the Beyond to know that it had the resources to handle whatever communication and archive demands might be made on it. And they wanted the Beyond to suspect that there were hidden gifts from the Transcend here, things that might make it more than a little dangerous to invaders.
She stared into the spray, feeling it bead on her lashes. So Grondr had the big problem right now: how do you tell a Power to take a walk? All Ravna Bergsndot had to worry about was one overconfident twit who seemed hell-bent on destroying himself. She turned and paralleled the water. Every third wave it surged over her ankles.
She sighed. Pham Nuwen was beyond doubt a twit… but what an awesome one. Intellectually, she had always known that there was no difference in the possible intelligence of Beyonders and the primitives of the Slowness. Most automation worked better in the Beyond; ultralight communication was possible. But you had to go to the Transcend to build truly superhuman minds. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Pham Nuwen was capable. Very capable. He had picked up Triskweline with incredible ease. She had little doubt that he was the master skipper he claimed. And to be a trader in the Slowness, to risk centuries between the stars for a destination that might have fallen from civilization or become deadly hostile to outsiders… that took courage that was hard to imagine. She could understand how he might think going to the Transcend was just another challenge. He’d had less than twenty days to absorb a whole new universe. That simply wasn’t enough time to understand that the rules change when the players are more than human.
Well, he still had a few days of grace. She would change his mind. And after talking to Grondr just now, she wouldn’t feel especially guilty about doing it.
CHAPTER 8
The Foreign Quarter was actually about a third of the Docks. It abutted the no-atmosphere periphery— where ships actually docked—and extended inwards to a section of the central sea. Vrinimi Org had convinced a significant number of races that this was a wonder of the Middle Beyond. In addition to freight traffic there were tourists—some of the wealthiest beings in the Beyond.
Pham Nuwen had carte blanche to these amusements. Ravna took him through the more spectacular ones, including an agrav hop over the Docks. The barbarian was more impressed by their pocket space suits than by the Docks. “I’ve seen structures bigger than that down in the Slowness.” Not hovering in a planetary gravity well, you haven’t.
Pham Nuwen seemed to mellow as the evening progressed. At least his comments became more perceptive,
