to know more. We need
to take a few risks." She stopped her pacing; all her eyes turned toward
Peregrine in a gesture of surprise. Abruptly she laughed.
"What?"
"Something we've thought before, dear Peregrine, but now I see how true
it may be. You're being a little bit clever and scheming here. A good
statesman and planner for the future."
"But still for a pilgrimly goal."
"To be sure.... And I, now I don't care so completely about the
planning and the safety. We will visit the stars someday." Her puppies
waggled a joyous salute. "I've a little of the pilgrim in me now, too."
She went down all on her bellies and crept across the floor toward him.
Consciousness slowly dissolved into a haze of loving lust. The last thing
Peregrine remembered her saying was, "How wonderful the luck: that I had
grown old and had to be new, and that you were just the change we need."
Peregrine's attention drifted back to the present, and Ravna. The human
was still grinning at him. She reached a hand across to brush one of his
heads. "Medieval minds indeed."
They sat in the fern shade for another couple of hours and watched the
tide come in. The sun fell through midafternoon -- even then it was as high
in the sky as any noontime sun could be at Woodcarver's. In some ways, the
quality of the light and the motion of the sun were the strangest things
about the scene. The sun was so high, and came down so straight, with none
of the long sliding glide of afternoon in the arctic. He had almost
forgotten what it was like in the land of Short Twilight.
Now the surf was thirty yards inland of where they had put the Rider.
The crescent moon was following the sun toward the horizon; the water
wouldn't rise any further. Ravna stood, shaded her eyes against the lowering
sun. "Time for us to go, I think."
"You think she'll be safe?"
Ravna nodded. "This was long enough for Greenstalk to notice any
poisons, and most predators. Besides, she's armed."
Human and Tines picked their way to the crest of the atoll, past the
tallest of the ferns. Peregrine kept a pair of eyes on the sea behind them.
The surf was well past Greenstalk now. Her location was still swept by deep
waves, but it was beyond the spume and spray. His last sight of her was in
the trough behind a crasher: the smoothness of the sea was broken for an
instant by two of her tallest fronds, the tips gently swaying.
Summer took gentle leave of the land around Hidden Island. There was
some rain, and no more brush fires. There would even be a harvest, war and
drought notwithstanding. Each dayaround the sun hid deeper behind the
northern hills, a time of twilight that broadened with the weeks till true
night held at midnight. And there were stars.
It was something of an accident that so many things came together on
the last night of summer. Ravna took the kids out skygazing on the fields by
Starship Castle.
No urban haze here, nor even near-space industry. Nothing to fog the
view of heaven except a subtle pinkness in the north that might have been
vagrant twilight -- or aurora. The four of them settled on the frosty moss
and looked around. Ravna took a deep breath. There was no hint of ash left
in the air, just a clean chill, a promise of winter.
"The snow will be deep as your shoulders, Ravna," said Jefri,
enthusiastic about the possibility. "You'll love it." The pale blotch that
was his face seemed to be looking back and forth across the sky.
"It can be bad," said Johanna Olsndot. She hadn't objected to coming up
here tonight, but Ravna knew that she would rather have stayed down on
Hidden Island to worry about the doings of tomorrow.
Jefri picked up on her unease -- no, that was Amdi talking now; they
would never cure those two of pretending to be each other. "Don't worry,
Johanna. We'll help you."
For a moment no one said anything. Ravna looked down the hill. It was
too dark to see the six hundred meter drop, too dark to see where fjord and
islands lay below. But the torchlight on the ramparts of Hidden Island
marked its location. Down there in Steel's old inner court -- where
Woodcarver now ruled -- were all the working coldboxes from the ship. One
hundred and fifty-one children slept there, the last survivors of the
Straumer's flight. Johanna claimed that most could be revived, with best
chance of success if it were done soon. The Queen had been enthusiastic
about the idea. Large sections of the castle had been set aside, refurbished
for human needs. Hidden Island was well sheltered -- if not from winter
snow, at least from the worst winds. If they could be revived, the children
would have no trouble living there. Ravna had come to love Jefri and Johanna
and Amdi -- But could she handle one hundred and fifty more? Woodcarver
seemed to have no misgivings. She had plans for a school where Tines would
learn of humans and the children would learn of this world.... Watching
Jefri and Amdi, Ravna was beginning to see what might become of this. Those
two were closer than any children she had ever known, and in sum more
competent. And that was not just the puppies' math genius; they were
competent in other ways.
Humans and Packs fit, and Old Woodcarver was clever enough to take
advantage of it. Ravna liked the Queen, and liked Pilgrim even more, but in
the end the Packs would be the great beneficiaries. Woodcarver clearly
understood the disabilities of her pack race. Tinish records went back at
least ten thousand years. For all their recorded history they had been
trapped in cultures not much less advanced than now. A race of sharp
intelligence, yet they had a single overwhelming disadvantage: they could
not cooperate at close range without losing that intelligence. Their
civilizations were made of isolated minds, forced introverts who could never
progress beyond certain limits. The eagerness of Pilgrim and Scrupilo and
the others for human contact was evidence of this. In the long run, we can
move the Tines out of this cul de sac.
Amdi and Jefri were giggling about something, the Pack sending runners
out almost to the limit of consciousness. These last weeks, Ravna had come
to learn that pell-mell activity was the norm for Amdi, that his initial
slowness had been part of his hurt over Steel. How ... perverse (or how
wonderful?) ... that a monster like Steel could be the object of such love.
Jefri shouted, "You watch in all directions, let me know where to
look." Silence. Then Jefri's voice again: "There!"
"What are you doing?" Johanna asked with sisterly belligerence.
"Watching for meteors," one of the two said. "Yes, I watch in all
directions and jab Jefri -- there! -- where to look when one comes by."
Ravna didn't see anything, but the boy had twisted around abruptly at
his friend's signal.
"Neat, neat," came Jefri's voice. "That was about forty kilometers up,
speed -- " the two's voice murmured unintelligibly for a second. Even with
the pack's wide vision, how could they know how high it was?
Ravna sat back in the hollow formed by the hummocky moss. It was a good
parka the locals had made for her; she barely felt the chill in the ground.
Overhead, the stars. Time to think, get some peace before all the things
that would begin tomorrow. Den Mother to one hundred and fifty kids ... and
I thought I was a librarian.
Back home she had loved the night sky; at one glance she could see the
other stars of Sjandra Kei, sometimes the other worlds. The places of her
home had been in her sky. For a moment the evening chill seemed part of a
winter that would never go away. Lynne and her folks and Sjandra Kei. Her
whole life till three years ago. It was all gone now. Don't think on it.
Somewhere out there was what was left of Aniara fleet, and what was left of
her people. Kjet Svensndot. Tirolle and Glimfrelle. She had only known them
for a few hours, but they were of Sjandra Kei -- and they had saved more
than they would ever know. They would still live. SjK Commercial Security
had some ramscoops in its fleet. They could find a world, not here, but
nearer the battle site.
Ravna tilted her head back, wondering at the sky. Where? Maybe not even
above the horizon now. From here the galactic disk was a glow that climbed
across the sky almost at right angles to the ecliptic. There was no sense of
its true shape or their exact position in it; the greater picture was lost
to nearby splendors, the bright knots of open clusters, frozen jewels
against the fainter light. But down near the southern horizon, far from the
galactic way, there were two splotchy clouds of light. The Magellanics!
Suddenly the geometry clicked, and the universe above was not completely
unknown. Aniara fleet would be --
"I -- I wonder if we can see Straumli Realm from here," said Johanna.
For more than a year now she had had to play the adult. Come tomorrow, that
role would be forever. But her voice just now was wistful, childlike.
Ravna opened her mouth, about to say how unlikely that must be.
"Maybe we can, maybe we can." It was Amdi. The pack had pulled itself
together, snuggled companionably among the humans. The warmth was welcome.
"See, I've been reading Dataset about where things are, and trying to figure
how it matches what we see." A pair of noses were silhouetted against the
sky for instant, like a human waving his hands exuberantly at the heavens.
"The brightest things we see are just kind of local dazzle. They aren't good
guide posts." He pointed at a couple of open clusters, claimed they matched
stuff he'd found in the Dataset. Amdi had also noticed the Magellanic
galaxies, and figured out far more than Ravna. "So anyway, Straumli Realm
was" -- was! you got it kid -- "in the High Beyond, but near the galactic
disk. So, see that big square of stars?" Noses jabbed. "We call that the
Great Square. Anyway, just left of the upper corner and go six thousand
light-years, and you'd be at Straumli Realm."
Jefri came to his knees and stared silently for a second. "But so far
away, is there anything to see?"
"Not the Straumli stars, but just forty light-years from Straum there's
a blue-white giant -- "
"Yeah," whispered Johanna. "Storlys. It was so bright you could see
shadows at night."
"Well that's the fourth brightest star up from the corner; see, they
almost make a straight line. I can see it, so I know you can."
Johanna and Jefri were silent for a long time, just staring up at that
patch of sky. Ravna's lips compressed in anger. These were good kids; they
had been through hell. And their parents had fought to prevent that hell;
they had escaped the Blight with the means of its destruction. But ... how
many million races had lived in the Beyond, had probed the Transcend and
made bargains with devils? How many more had destroyed themselves There? Ah,
but that had not been enough for Straumli Realm. They had gone into the
Transcend and wakened Something that could take over a galaxy.
"Do you think anybody's left there?" said Jefri. "Do you think we're
all that's left?"
His sister put an arm around him. "Maybe, maybe not Straumli Realm. But
the rest of the universe -- look, it's still there." Weak laughter. "Daddy
and Mom, Ravna and Pham. They stopped the Blight." She waved a hand against
the sky. "They saved most all of it."
"Yes," said Ravna. "We're saved and safe, Jefri. To begin again." And
as far as it went, that comfort was probably true. The ship's zone probes
were still working. Of course, a single measure point is of no use for
precise zonography, but she could tell that they were deep in the new volume
of the Slowness, the volume created by Pham's Revenge. And -- much more
significant -- the OOB detected no variation in zonal intensity. Gone was
the continuous trembling of the months before. This new status had the
feeling of mountain roots, to be moved only by the passage of the ages.
Fifty degrees along the galactic river was another unremarkable space
of sky. She didn't point it out to the kids, but what was of interest there
was much nearer, just under thirty light-years out: the Blighter Fleet.
Flies trapped in amber. At normal jump rates for the Low Beyond, they had
been just hours away when Pham created the Great Surge. And now ...? If they
had been bottom luggers, ships with ramscoops, they could close the gap in
less than fifty years. But Aniara Fleet had made their sacrifice; they had
followed Pham's godshattered advice. And though they didn't know it, they
had broken the Blight. There wasn't a single Slow Zone capable vessel in the
approaching fleet. Perhaps they had some in-system capability -- a few
thousand klicks per second. But no more, not Down Here, where new
construction was not a matter of waving a magic wand. The Blight's
extermination force would sweep past Tines World in ... a few thousand
years. Time enough.
Ravna leaned back against one of Amdi's shoulders. He nestled
comfortably around her neck. The puppies had grown these last two months;
apparently Steel had kept them on some sort of stunting drugs. Her gaze lost
itself in the dark and glow: far upon far that were all the Zones above her.
And where are the boundaries now? How awesome was Pham's Revenge. Maybe she
should call it Old One's Revenge. No, it was far more even than that. "Old
One" was just a recent victim of the Blight. Even Old One was no more than
midwife to this revenge. The first cause must be as old as the original
Blight and more powerful than the Powers.
But whatever caused it, the Surge had done more than revenge. Ravna had
studied the ship's measurement of zone intensity. It could only be an
estimate, but she knew they were trapped between one thousand and thirty
thousand light-years deep in the new Slowness. Powers only knew how far the
Surge had pushed the Slowness.... And maybe even some of the Powers were
destroyed by it. This was like some vision of planetary armageddon -- the
type of thing that primitive civilizations nightmared about -- but blown up
to a galactic scale. A huge hunk of the Milky Way galaxy had been gobbled up
by the Slowness, all in a single afternoon. Not just the Blighter Fleet were
flies trapped in amber. Why, the whole vault of heaven -- excepting the
Magellanics faint and far away -- might now be a tomb of Slowness. Many must
still be alive out there, but how many millions of starships had been
trapped between the stars? How many automated systems had failed, killing
the civilizations that depended on them? Heaven was truly silent now. In
some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.
And what of the Blight -- not the fleet that chased the OOB, but the
Blight itself? That was a creature of the Top and the Transcend. At a very
far remove, it covered much of the sky they could see this night. Could
Pham's revenge have really toppled it? If there was a point to all the
sacrifice, then surely so. A surge so great that it pushed the Slowness up
thousands of light-years, through the Low and Mid Beyond, past the great
civilizations at the Top ... and into the Transcend. No wonder it was so
eager to stop us. A Power immersed in the Slowness would be a Power no more,
would likely be a living thing no more. If, if, if. If Pham's Surge could
climb so high.
And that is something I will never know.
Crypto: 0
As received by:
Language path: Optima
From: Society for Rational Investigation
Subject: Ping
Key phrases: Help me!
Summary: Has there been a network partition, or what?
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Society for Rational Network Management, War Trackers Interest Group
Date: 0.412 Msec since loss of contacts
Text of message:
I have still not recovered contact with any network site known to be
spinward of me. Apparently, I am right at the edge of a catastrophe.
If you receive this ping, please respond! Am I in danger?
For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are
antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long
way around the galaxy. At least that would give us an idea how big the loss
is. Nothing has come back as yet -- not surprising, I guess, considering the
great number of hops and the expense.
In the meantime, I am sending out pings such as this. I am expending
enormous resources to do this, let me tell you -- but it is that important.
I've beamed direct at all the hub sites that are in range to the spinward of
me. No replies.
More ominous: I have tried to transmit "over the top", that is by using
known sites in the Transcend that are above the catastrophe. Most such would
not normally respond, Powers being what they are. But I received no replies.
A silence like the Depths is there. It appears that a portion of the
Transcend itself has been engulfed.
Again: If you receive this message, please respond!
THE END