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 not 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.
