“Several.”
So much for “a quick flight, all unobserved'. Ravna sighed. The final fitting at Relay was to include spares and Bottom compatibility software. All that was faraway might-have-beens now. She looked at Greenstalk. “Do you have any ideas?”
“About what?” Greenstalk said.
Ravna bit her lip in frustration. Some said the Riders were a race of comedians; they were indeed, but it was mostly unintentional.
Blueshell rattled at his mate.
“Oh! You mean where can we get help. Yes, there are several possibilities. Sjandra Kei is thirty-nine hundred lights spinward from here, but outside this storm. We—”
“Too far,” Blueshell and Ravna spoke almost in chorus.
“Yes, yes, but remember. The Sjandra Kei worlds are mainly human, your home, my lady Ravna. And Blueshell and I know them well; after all, they were the source of the crypto shipment we brought to Relay. We have friends there and you a family. Even Blueshell agrees that we can get the work done without notice there.”
“Yes, if we could get there.” Blueshell’s voder voice sounded petulant.
“Okay, what are the other choices?”
“They are not so well-known. I’ll make a list.” Her fronds drifted across a console. “Our last chance for choice is rather near our planned course. It’s a single system civilization. The Net name is… it translates as Harmonious Repose.”
“Rest in Peace, eh?” said Pham.
But they had agreed to voyage on quietly, always watching the bad drive spines, postponing the decision to stop for help.
The days became weeks, and weeks slowly counted into months. Four voyagers on a quest toward the Bottom. The drive became worse, but slowly, right on OOB’s diagnostic projections.
The Blight continued to spread across the Top of the Beyond, and its attacks on Network archives extended far beyond its direct reach.
Communication with Jefri was improving. Messages trickled in at the rate of one or two a day. Sometimes, when OOB’s antenna swarm was tuned just right, he and Ravna would talk almost in real time. Progress was being made on the Tines’ world, faster than she had expected—perhaps fast enough that the boy could save himself.
It should have been a hard time, locked up in the single ship with just three others, with only a thread of communication to the outside, and that with a lost child.
In any case, it was rarely boring. Ravna found that each of them had plenty to do. For herself it was managing the ship’s library, coaxing out of it the plans that would help Mr. Steel and Jefri. OOB’s library was nothing compared to the Archive at Relay, or even the university libraries at Sjandra Kei, but without proper search automation it could be just as unknowable. And as their voyage proceeded, that automation need more and more special care.
And… things could never be boring with Pham around. He had a dozen projects, and curiosity about everything. “Voyaging time can be a gift,” he’d say. “Now we have time to catch ourselves up, time to get ready for whatever we find ahead.” He was learning Samnorsk. It went slower than his faked learning on Relay, but the guy had a natural bent for languages, and Ravna gave him plenty of practice.
He spent several hours each day in the OOB’s workshop, often with Blueshell. Reality graphics were a new thing to him, but after a few weeks he was beyond toy prototypes. The pressure suits he built had power packs and weapons stores. “We don’t know what things may be like when we arrive; powered armor could be real useful.”
At the end of each work day they would all meet on the command deck, to compare notes, to consider the latest from Jefri and Mr. Steel, to review the drive status. For Ravna this could be the happiest time of the day… and sometimes the hardest. Pham had rigged the display automation to show castle walls all around. A huge fireplace replaced the normal window on comm status. The sound of it was almost perfect; he had even coaxed a small amount of “fire” heat from that wall. This was a castle hall out of Pham’s memory, from Canberra he said. But it wasn’t that different from the Age of Princesses on Nyjora (though most of those castles had been in tropical swamps, where big fireplaces were rarely used). For some perverse reason, even the Riders seemed to enjoy it; Greenstalk said it reminded her of a trading stop from her first years with Blueshell. Like travelers who have walked through a long day, the four of them rested in the coziness of a phantom lodge. And when the new business was settled, Pham and the Riders would trade stories, often late into the “night'.
Ravna sat beside him, the least talkative of the four. She joined in the laughter and sometimes the discussion: There was the time Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham’s faith in public key encryption, and Ravna knew some stories of her own to illustrate the Rider’s opinion. But this was also the hardest time for her. Yes, the stories were wonderful. Blueshell and Greenstalk had been so many places, and at heart they were traders. Swindles and bargains and good done were all part of their lives. Pham listened to his friends, almost enraptured… and then told his own stories, of being a prince on Canberra, of being a Slow Zone trader and explorer. And for all the limitations of the Slowness, his life’s adventures surpassed even the Skroderiders’. Ravna smiled and tried to pretend enthusiasm.
For Pham’s stories were too much. He honestly believed them, but she couldn’t imagine one human seeing so much, doing so much. Back on Relay, she had claimed his memories were synthetic, a little joke of Old One. She had been very angry when she said it, and more than anything she wished she never had… because it was so clearly the truth. Greenstalk and Blueshell never noticed, but sometimes in the middle of a story Pham would stumble on his memories and a look of barely concealed panic would come to his eyes. Somewhere inside, he knew the truth too, and she suddenly wanted to hug him, comfort him. It was like having a terribly wounded friend, with whom you can talk but never mutually admit the scope of the injuries. Instead she pretended the lapses didn’t exist, smiling and laughing at the rest of his story.
And Old One’s jape was all so unnecessary. Pham didn’t have to be a great hero. He was a decent person, though ebullient and kind of a rule-breaker. He had every bit as much persistence as she, and more courage.
What craft Old One must have had to make such a person, what… Power. And how she hated Him, for making a joke of such a person.
Of Pham’s godshatter, there was scarcely a sign. For that Ravna was very grateful. Once or twice a month he had a dreamy spell. For a day or two after he would go nuts with some new project, often something he couldn’t clearly explain. But it wasn’t getting worse; he wasn’t drifting away from her.
“And the godshatter may save us in the end,” he would say when she had the courage to ask him about it. “No, I don’t know how.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s still god’s own crowded attic up here. “It’s more than memory. Sometimes it needs all my mind to think with and there’s no room left for self-awareness, and afterwards I can’t explain, but… sometimes I have a glimmer. Whatever Jefri’s parents brought to the Tines’ world: it can hurt the Blight. Call it an antidote—better yet, a countermeasure. Something taken from the Perversion as it was aborning in the Straumli lab. Something the Perversion didn’t even suspect was gone until much later.”
Ravna sighed. It was hard to imagine good news that was also so frightening. “The Straumers could sneak something like that right out from the Perversion’s heart?”
“Maybe. Or maybe, Countermeasure used the Straumers to escape the Perversion. To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the plan might work, Rav, at least if I—if Old One’s godshatter—can get down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of the Beyond upside down—hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it’s looking in all the wrong places. We’ll have our chance at Countermeasure.”
She thought of Jefri’s messages. “The rot on the walls of Jefri’s ship. You think that’s what it is?”
Pham’s eyes went vague. “Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He seems a little disgusted by it… That’s good, probably keeps his Tinish friends away from it.”
A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham’s mind too. And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would stand before that unknown and Old One’s dead hand would act…
