offspring can never be you. But for me, it’s the end of a soul six hundred years old. You see, I’m going to keep these two to be part of me… and for the first time in all the centuries, I am not both the mother and the father. A newby I’ll become.”
Johanna looked at the blind one and the drooler. Six hundred years of incest. How much longer could Woodcarver have continued before the mind itself decayed? Not both the mother and the father. “But then who is father?” she blurted out.
“Who do you think?” The voice came from just beyond the door. One of Peregrine Wickwrackscar’s heads peered around the corner just far enough to show an eye. “When Woodcarver makes a decision, she goes for extremes. She’s been the most tightly held soul of all time. But now she has blood—genes, Dataset would say— from packs all over the world, from one of the flakiest pilgrims who ever cast his soul upon the wind.”
“Also from one of the smartest,” said Woodcarver, her voice wry and wistful at the same time. “The new soul will be at least as intelligent as before, and probably a lot more flexible.”
“And I’m a little bit pregnant, myself,” said Pilgrim. “But I’m not the least bit sad. I’ve been a foursome for too long. Imagine, having pups by Woodcarver herself! Maybe I’ll turn all conservative and settle down.”
“Hah! Even two from me is not enough to slow your pilgrim soul.”
Johanna listened to the banter. The ideas were so alien, and yet the overtones of affection and humor were somehow very familiar. Somewhere… then she had it: When Johanna was just five years old, and Mom and Dad brought little Jefri home. Johanna couldn’t remember the words, or even the sense of what they’d said—but the tone was the same as what went between Woodcarver and Pilgrim.
Johanna slid back to a sitting position, the tension of the day evaporating. Scrupilo’s artillery really worked; there was a chance of getting the ship. And even if they failed… she felt a little bit like she was back home.
“C-can I pet your puppy?”
CHAPTER 25
The voyage of the Out of Band II had begun in catastrophe, where life and death were a difference of hours or minutes. In the first weeks there had been terror and loneliness and the resurrection of Pham. The OOB had fallen quickly toward the galactic plane, away from Relay. Day by day the whorl of stars tilted up to meet them, till it was the single band of light, the Milky Way as seen from the perspective of Nyjora and Old Earth—and from most all the habitable planets of the Galaxy.
Twenty thousand light-years in three weeks. But that had been on a path through the Middle Beyond. Now in the galactic plane, they were still six thousand light-years from their goal at the Bottom of the Beyond. The Zone interfaces roughly followed surfaces of constant mean density; on a galactic scale, the Bottom was a vaguely lens- shaped surface, surrounding much of the galactic disk. The OOB was moving in the plane of the disk now, more or less toward the galactic center. Every week took them deeper toward the Slowness. Worse, their path, and all variants that made any progress, extended right through a region of massive Zone shifting. The Net News had called it the Great Zone Storm, though of course there was not the slightest physical feeling of turbulence within the volume. But some days their progress was less that eighty percent what they’d expected.
Early on they’d known that it was not only the storm that was slowing them. Blueshell had gone outside, looking over the damage that still remained from their escape.
“So it’s the ship itself?” Ravna had glared out from the bridge, watching the now imperceptible crawl of near stars across the heavens. The confirmation was no revelation. But what to do?
Blueshell trundled back and forth across the ceiling. Every time he reached the far wall, he’d query ship’s management about the pressure seal on the nose lock. Ravna glared at him, “Hey, that was the n’th time you’ve checked status in the last three minutes. If you really think something is wrong, then fix it.”
The Skroderider’s wheeled progress came to an abrupt halt. Fronds waved uncertainly. “But I was just outside. I want to be sure I shut the port correctly… Oh, you mean I’ve already checked it?”
Ravna looked up at him, and tried to get the sting out of her voice. Blueshell wasn’t the proper target for her frustration. “Yup. At least five times.”
“I’m sorry.” He paused, going into the stillness of complete concentration. “I’ve committed the memory.” Sometimes the habit was cute, and sometimes just irritating: When the Riders tried to think on more than one thing at a time, their Skrodes were sometimes unable to maintain short-term memory. Blueshell especially got trapped into cycles of behavior, repeating an action and immediately forgetting the accomplishment.
Pham grinned, looking a lot cooler than Ravna felt. “What I don’t see is why you Riders put up with it.”
“What?”
“Well, according to the ship’s library, you’ve had these Skrode gadgets since before there was a Net. So how come you haven’t improved the design, gotten rid of the silly wheels, upgraded the memory tracking? I bet that even a Slow Zone combat programmer like me could come up with a better design than the one you’re riding.”
“It’s really a matter of tradition,” Blueshell said primly, “We’re grateful to Whatever gave us wheels and memory in the first place.”
“Hmm.”
Ravna almost smiled. By now she knew Pham well enough to guess what he was thinking—namely that plenty of Riders might have gone on to better things in the Transcend. Those remaining were likely to have self- imposed limitations.
“Yes. Tradition. Many who once were Riders have changed—even Transcended. But we persist.” Greenstalk paused, and when she continued sounded even more shy than usual. “You’ve heard of the Rider Myth?”
“No,” said Ravna, distracted in spite of herself. In the time ahead she would know as much about these Riders as about any human friends, but for now there were still surprises.
“Not many have. Not that it’s a secret; it’s just we don’t make much of it. It comes close to being religion, but one we don’t proselytize. Four or five billion years ago, Someone built the first skrodes and raised the first Riders to sentience. That much is verified fact. The Myth is that something destroyed our Creator and all its works… A catastrophe so great that from this distance it is not even understood as an act of mind.”
There were plenty of theories about what the galaxy had been like in the distant past, in the time of the Ur- Partition. But the Net couldn’t be forever. There had to be a beginning. Ravna had never been a big believer in Ancient Wars and Catastrophes.
“So in a sense,” Greenstalk said, “we Riders are the faithful ones, waiting for What created us to return. The traditional skrode and the traditional interface are a standard. Staying with it has made our patience possible.”
“Quite so,” said Blueshell. “And the design itself is very subtle, My Lady, even if the function is simple.” He rolled to the center of the ceiling. “The skrode of tradition imposes a good discipline—concentration on what’s truly important. Just now I was trying to worry about too many things…” Abruptly he returned to the topic at hand: “Two of our drive spines never recovered from the damage at relay. Three more appear to be degrading. We thought this slow progress was just the storm, but now I’ve studied the spines up close. The diagnostic warnings were no false alarm.”
“… and it’s still getting worse?”
“Unfortunately so.”
“So how bad will it get?”
Blueshell drew all his tendrils together. “My Lady Ravna, we can’t be certain of the extrapolations yet. It may not get much worse than now, or -You know the OOB was not fully ready for departure. There were the final consistency checks still to do. In a way, I worry about that more than anything. We don’t know what bugs may lurk, especially when we reach the Bottom and our normal automation must be retired. We must watch the drives very carefully… and hope.”
It was the nightmare that haunted travelers, especially at the Bottom of the Beyond: with ultradrive gone, suddenly a light-year was not a matter of minutes but of years. Even if they fired up the ramscoop and went into cold sleep, Jefri Olsndot would be a thousand years dead before they reached him, and the secret of his parents’ ship buried in some medieval midden.
Pham Nuwen waved at the slowly shifting star fields. “Still, this is the Beyond. Every hour we go farther than the fleet of Qeng Ho could in a decade.” He shrugged. “Surely there’s some place we can get repairs?”
