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A Fire Upon the Deep

Synopsis

"A Fire Upon the Deep" is a science fiction novel that explores a universe where different zones of thought exist, affecting the capabilities of civilizations and artificial intelligences. The story follows multiple plotlines, including a human expedition that accidentally releases an ancient and powerful AI, and the struggle for survival on a medieval-level planet of dog-like aliens. These plotlines converge as various factions race to control or contain the galaxy-threatening AI.

Thoughts

Overall the story is sprawling and adventurous, the breadth of the galaxy and narrative is impressive. I had a lot of fun, but wanted more in the middle. I loved the part where they stopped off at a random planet and hell broke loose. The Tines world/race is cool and all, but I was more intrigued with Ravna and Pham, and I loved the Skroderiders!

The prose is simple and effective. Nothing too heady and the lack of intellectual insight actually left me wanting more, to be challenged further as opposed to just tagging along for a fun ride to save the galaxy.

Highlights

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Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.

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For a moment, Sjana Olsndot stopped shooting. That was enough. The mob parted and a large group ran purposefully toward the boat. They had tanks of some kind on their backs. The lead animal held a hose in its mouth. A dark liquid jetted out 
 and vanished in an explosion of fire. The wolf pack played their crude flamethrower across the ground, across the pylon where Sjana Olsndot stood, across the ranks of school children in coldsleep. Johanna saw something moving, twisting in the flames and tarry smoke, saw the light plastic of the coldsleep boxes slump and flow. Johanna turned her face to the earth, then pushed herself up on her good arm and tried to crawl toward the boat, the flames. And then the dark was merciful, and she remembered no more.

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There were four legs per member, but it walked on its rear legs only. What a clown! Yet 
 it used its front paws for holding things. Not once did he see it use a mouth; he doubted if the flat jaws could get a good hold, anyway. Those forepaws were wonderfully agile. A single member could easily use tools.

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His cot was being dragged again, this time down a torch-lit tunnel. They stopped by a double door, two meters wide but scarcely one high. A pair of metal triangles was set in the blond wood. Later Jefri learned they signified a number—fifteen or thirty-three, depending on whether you counted by legs or fore-claws. Much, much later he learned that his keeper had counted by legs and the builder of the castle by fore-claws. Thus he ended up in the wrong room. It was a mistake that would change the history of worlds.

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When two people have a clear understanding of power and betrayal, then betrayal itself becomes almost impossible. There is only the ordered flow of events, bringing good to those who deserve to rule.

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Qeng Ho was like a million other doomed civilizations, buried thousands of light-years in the Slowness. Only by luck would they ever penetrate into the Beyond, where faster-than-light travel was possible.

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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.

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“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.

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The place was modeled as a meeting lodge on some world of the Slow Zone. A three-meter model ramscoop hung in the air over the main service floor. Blue-green drive fields glowed from the ship’s every corner and flange, and spread faintly among patrons sitting below. To Ravna the walls and floors were heavy timber, rough cut. People like Egravan saw stone walls and narrow tunnels—the sort of broodery his race had maintained on new conquests of long ago. The trickery was optical—not some mental smudging—and about the best that could be done in the Middle Beyond. Ravna and Pham walked between widely spaced tables. The owners weren’t as successful with sound as with vision; the music was faint and changed from table to table. Smells changed too, and were a little bit harder to take. Air management was working hard to keep everyone healthy, if not completely comfortable. Tonight the place was crowded. At the far end of the service floor, the special-atmosphere nooks were occupied: low pressure, high pressure, high NOx, aquaria. Some customers were vague blurs within turbid atmospheres.

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“In the Transcend, truly sophisticated equipment can operate devices substantially smarter than anyone down here. Of course, almost any economic or military competition can be won by the side with superior computing resources. Such can be had at the Top of the Beyond and in the Transcend. Races are always migrating there, hoping to build their utopias. But what do you do when your new creations may be smarter than you are? It happens that there are limitless possibilities for disaster, even if an existing Power does not cause harm. So there are unnumbered recipes for safely taking advantage of the Transcend. Of course they can’t be effectively examined except in the Transcend. And run on devices of their own description, the recipes themselves become sentient.”

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The Powers were variously malevolent, playful, indifferent—but virtually all of them had better uses for their time than exterminating cockroaches in the wild.

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More sophisticated devices would be built, and with fewer safeguards. Conceivably, the humans were killed or rewritten before the Perversion even achieved transsapience.”

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Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters. Two of these three might be mistaken for potted trees on hotcarts, and the third was unlike any human in her life. Their fluency was in an artificial language, and two of the “voices” were squawky raspings.

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She’d guessed right: tonight the galaxy owned the sky. It was a sight that Vrinimi old hands happily ignored. For Ravna it was the most beautiful thing about Relay. Without enhancement, the light was faint. Twenty thousand light-years is a long, long way. At first there was just a suggestion of mist, and an occasional star. As her eyes adapted, the mist took shape, curving arcs, some places brighter, some dimmer. A minute more and 
 there were knots in the mist 
 there were streaks of utter black that separated the curving arms 
 complexity on complexity, twisting toward the pale hub that was the Core. Maelstrom. Whirlpool. Frozen, still, across half the sky.

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You could study your whole life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? It’s not a good analogy, but it’s the only safe one; we are like dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different things people do to animals—ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal—each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not exist.” She waved at the misty star swarms. “The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We’re so far down that the beings on the surface—superior though they are—can’t effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don’t even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place.” She paused. There was more to the analogy. “And just as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories—but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices. Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can’t make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor.”

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“So there are always ‘fish’ edging close to the surface.” For an instant she thought she had lost him, that he was caught by the romance of the Transcendent death wish. “Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood 
 and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.” She felt him shiver, and then his arms were around her. She tilted her head up and found his lips waiting.

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The place was modeled as a meeting lodge on some world of the Slow Zone. A three-meter model ramscoop hung in the air over the main service floor. Blue-green drive fields glowed from the ship’s every corner and flange, and spread faintly among patrons sitting below. To Ravna the walls and floors were heavy timber, rough cut. People like Egravan saw stone walls and narrow tunnels—the sort of broodery his race had maintained on new conquests of long ago. The trickery was optical—not some mental smudging—and about the best that could be done in the Middle Beyond. Ravna and Pham walked between widely spaced tables. The owners weren’t as successful with sound as with vision; the music was faint and changed from table to table. Smells changed too, and were a little bit harder to take. Air management was working hard to keep everyone healthy, if not completely comfortable. Tonight the place was crowded. At the far end of the service floor, the special-atmosphere nooks were occupied: low pressure, high pressure, high NOx, aquaria. Some customers were vague blurs within turbid atmospheres.

id744969364

“In the Transcend, truly sophisticated equipment can operate devices substantially smarter than anyone down here. Of course, almost any economic or military competition can be won by the side with superior computing resources. Such can be had at the Top of the Beyond and in the Transcend. Races are always migrating there, hoping to build their utopias. But what do you do when your new creations may be smarter than you are? It happens that there are limitless possibilities for disaster, even if an existing Power does not cause harm. So there are unnumbered recipes for safely taking advantage of the Transcend. Of course they can’t be effectively examined except in the Transcend. And run on devices of their own description, the recipes themselves become sentient.”

id744969365

The Powers were variously malevolent, playful, indifferent—but virtually all of them had better uses for their time than exterminating cockroaches in the wild.

id744969366

More sophisticated devices would be built, and with fewer safeguards. Conceivably, the humans were killed or rewritten before the Perversion even achieved transsapience.”

id744969367

Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters. Two of these three might be mistaken for potted trees on hotcarts, and the third was unlike any human in her life. Their fluency was in an artificial language, and two of the “voices” were squawky raspings.

id744969368

She’d guessed right: tonight the galaxy owned the sky. It was a sight that Vrinimi old hands happily ignored. For Ravna it was the most beautiful thing about Relay. Without enhancement, the light was faint. Twenty thousand light-years is a long, long way. At first there was just a suggestion of mist, and an occasional star. As her eyes adapted, the mist took shape, curving arcs, some places brighter, some dimmer. A minute more and 
 there were knots in the mist 
 there were streaks of utter black that separated the curving arms 
 complexity on complexity, twisting toward the pale hub that was the Core. Maelstrom. Whirlpool. Frozen, still, across half the sky.

id744969369

You could study your whole life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? It’s not a good analogy, but it’s the only safe one; we are like dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different things people do to animals—ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal—each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not exist.” She waved at the misty star swarms. “The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We’re so far down that the beings on the surface—superior though they are—can’t effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don’t even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place.” She paused. There was more to the analogy. “And just as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories—but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices. Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can’t make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor.”

id744969370

“So there are always ‘fish’ edging close to the surface.” For an instant she thought she had lost him, that he was caught by the romance of the Transcendent death wish. “Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood 
 and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.” She felt him shiver, and then his arms were around her. She tilted her head up and found his lips waiting.

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We are little fish in the abyss, protected by the deep from the fishers above. But even if they can’t live down here, the clever fisherfolk still have their lures and deadly tricks. And so Pham—“Pham Nuwen is just a robot, then,” she said softly.

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The heads leaned forward at her cry, and she heard the scream again. Behind her, her own voice shouted, “Damn you!” Somewhere else, she was calling for “Mom” and “Daddy.” Johanna screamed again, and they just echoed it back. She swallowed her terror and kept silent. The monsters kept it up for a half minute, the mimicking, the mixing of things she must have said in her sleep. When they saw they couldn’t terrorize her that way anymore, the voices stopped being human. The gobbling went back and forth, as if the two groups were negotiating or something.

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One of the rats held it at the tip of its mouth, while the other two pulled it apart. It was all done with their uncanny precision. The pack seemed like a single creature, and each neck a heavy tentacle that ended in a pair of jaws.

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He gently experimented on himself and on the other artists in his little colony. He watched the results, using them to design new experiments. He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

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Her blind one looked around as it made the words, almost as if it could see. Two others wiped at her drooler’s muzzle. She was not an inspiring sight.

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Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.”

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Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

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Steel had tried love in place of Flenser’s original terror/love combination; there had been a slim chance that it might be superior. By great good luck Amdiranifani fell into the love group. Even his instructors had avoided negative reinforcement. The pack would believe anything he said 
 and so, Steel hoped, would the mantis.

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How she envied them; if tensions annoyed them, they could simply turn them off. The Skroderiders were one of the most common sophonts in the Beyond. There were many varieties, but analysis agreed with legend: very long ago they had been one species. Somewhere in the off-Net past, they had been sessile dwellers of seashores. Left to themselves, they had developed a form of intelligence almost devoid of short-term memory. They sat in the surf, thinking thoughts that left no imprints on their minds. Only repetition of a stimulus, over a period of time, could do that. But the intelligence and memory that they had was of survival value. It made it possible for them to select the best possible place to cast their pupal seeds, locations that would mean safety and food for the next generation.

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She’d almost thought she could make a difference just by talking. What a joke. She had caught a glimpse just now, behind the front: of a being who could play with souls the way a programmer plays with a clever graphic, a being so far beyond her that only its indifference could protect her. Be happy, little Ravna moth. You were only dazzled by the flame.

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Now starships floated up from their berths across the sea, falling higher and higher till they glittered in the departed sunlight.

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Ravna felt the dirt giving way beneath her feet, and then they were falling. The Docks were hundreds—in places, thousands—of meters thick. They fell past them now, past dim eerie flickers of internal destruction. Then they were through, still falling. For a moment the feeling of wild panic was gone. After all this was simply free fall, a commonplace, and a damn sight more peaceful than the disintegrating Docks. Now it was easy to hold on to the Riders and Pham Nuwen, and even their commensal atmosphere seemed a little thicker than before. There was something to be said for hard vacuum and free fall.

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This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you.

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When packs came this close, and in these numbers, the world seemed to teeter on the edge of a choir. Each person hung near to himself, trying to keep his own thoughts intact. It was hard to walk without stumbling over your own feet. And sometimes the background thought sounds would surge, a moment where several packs would somehow synchronize. Your consciousness wavered and for an instant you were one with many, a superpack that might be a god. Jaqueramaphan shivered. That was the essential attraction of the tropics. The crowds there were mobs, vast group minds as stupid as they were ecstatic. If the stories were true, some of the southern cities were nonstop orgies.

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According to the News (that is, according to the vast majority of the opinions expressed),

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The creature she watched was soul-dead. Somehow, the Blight didn’t care that that was obvious 
 maybe it wasn’t obvious except to human viewers, and they were a vanishingly small fraction of the audience.

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You could wait days for an appointment, and the more patient you were, the more you followed the rules, the more the bureaucrats considered you a nonentity.

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Pham felt tears leaking from his eyes. And knew that part of the deadness inside had been grief for His own death. “Subtle damage!” He shook his head and the tears drifted into the air. “My head is stuffed with Him, with His memories.” Memories? They towered over everything else. Yet he could not understand them. He could not understand the details. He could not even understand the emotions, except as inane simplifications—joy, laughter, wonder, fear, and icy-steel determination. Now he was lost in those memories, wandering like an idiot in a cathedral. Not understanding, cowering before icons. She pivoted around their clasped hands. After a moment her knee bumped gently against his. “You’re still human, you still have your own—” Her own voice broke as she saw the look in his eyes. “My own memories.”

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Pham was silent an instant, trying to fit the idea into his situation. “That doesn’t makes sense. There’s not room in me to be superhuman.” Fear chased hope in tight circles.

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“Godshatter?”

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He ran his hand lightly across her face, and his smile was sad where there should have been joy. “But don’t you see, Ravna? If you’re right, today may be the most human I’ll ever be. I’m full of Old One’s download, this godshatter. Most of it I’ll never consciously understand, but if things work properly, it will eventually come exploding out. His remote device; His robot at the Bottom of the Beyond.” No! But she made herself shrug. “Maybe. But you’re human, and we’re working for the same things.
 and I’m not letting you go.”

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Though the “rediscovery problem” was trivial in the Beyond, down in the Slow Zone almost every conceivable combination of events had happened. Civilizations in the Slowness could not last more than a few thousand years. Their collapse was sometimes a short eclipse, a few decades spent recovering from war or atmosphere-bashing. Others drove themselves back to medievalism. And of course, most races eventually exterminated themselves, at least within their single solar system. Those that didn’t exterminate themselves (and even a few of those that did) eventually struggled back to their original heights.

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Why let the team break up at the end of a work shift? Flenser work teams stayed together indefinitely, housed in barracks so small they could never recover their separate pack minds. It worked well. After a year or two, and with proper culling, the original packs in such teams were dull things that scarcely wanted to break away.

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It might have been safer to forego the gifts, and persuade the Visitors that there is nothing here worth rescuing.”

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Deep past midnight, the dataset’s screen was brighter than the gray light from the fire pit. It painted the backs of Woodcarver in cheerful colors. The pack gathered round her, looking up, almost like children listening to a teacher.

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“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.”

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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.

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Yes, always problems, but 
 in a way she was more content than she had been in years. Sure there were problems. Poor Jefri’s situation. All the people lost at Straum and Relay. But she had three friends, and a love. Alone in a tiny ship bound for the Bottom, she was less lonely than she’d been since leaving Sjandra Kei. More than ever in her life, maybe she could do something to help with the problems. And then she guessed, part in sadness, part in joy, that years from now she might look back on these months as goldenly happy.

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The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.

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Two legs or four legs—evolved from flippers or jaws or whatever—were all very good for movement on land. But in space it scarcely mattered.

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The Skroderiders had arrived in a spherical room perhaps fifty meters across. Apparently they were floating near the center of it. A forest grew inward from all directions, and the Riders seemed to float just a few meters from the tree tops. Here and there between the branches they could see the ground, a mosaic of flowers.

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Giant butterflies, actually. The newcomers had a generally humanoid body plan. They were about 150 centimeters tall and covered with soft-looking brown fur. Their wings sprouted from behind their shoulder blades. At full spread they were almost two meters across, soft blues and yellows, some more intricately patterned than others. Surely they were artificial, or a gengineered affectation; they would have been useless for flying about in any reasonable gravity. But here in zero-gee.
 The three floated at the entrance for just a moment, their huge, soft eyes looking up at the Riders. Then they moved their wings in measured sweeps, and drifted gracefully into the air above the forest. The entire effect was like something out of a children’s video. They had pert, button noses, like pet jorakorns, and eyes as wide and bashful as any human animator ever drew. Their voices sounded like youngsters singing.

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“Is she all right?” Pham gave a little nod. “She’s sleeping now.” Sedated, and with the ship watching her in case I’ve misjudged her. “Look, she’ll be okay. She’s been hit hard 
 but she’s the toughest one of us all.” Greenstalk’s fronds rattled a smile. “I have often thought that.”

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Not that the forest creatures were without defenses: for millions of years threat and counterthreat had evolved here. Almost every animal could generate ultrasonic screeching that totally drowned the thought of any nearby pack. There were parts of the forest that seemed silent to Johanna, but through which the army drove at a cautious gallop, troops and drivers writhing in agony from the unseen assault.

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Johanna didn’t remember much of the ceremony, so much of her attention was on White-head. Woodcarver said something long and unintelligible. Somehow they both ended up with intricately carven decorations on their collars, and were headed back toward the rest of Scrupilo. Then she was aware of the crowd once more. They stretched as far as she could see under the forest canopy—and every one of them seemed to be cheering, Scrup’s cannoneers loudest of all.

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“I praised you beyond the skies. Singletons often do brave things. Sometimes they are halfway clever, or talk as though they are. But alone, Scrupilo’s fragment wouldn’t be much more than a good knife fighter. He knew about using the cannon, but he didn’t have the paws or mouths to do anything with it. And by himself, he would never have figured out where to shoot it. You, on the other hand, are a Two-Legs. In many ways you are helpless. The only way you can think is by yourself, but you can do it without interfering with those around you. Together you did what no pack could do in the middle of a wolf-nest attack. So I told my army what a team our two races could become, how each makes up for the age-old failings of the other. Together, we are one step closer to being the Pack of Packs.

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I believe what I said about things that could be, but I fear that my soul may not be strong enough to make them so.

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We see no evidence of internal evolution; in some ways it is less than a Power. It may never lose interest in controlling the High Beyond. We may be witnessing a massive and permanent change in the nature of things. Imagine a stable necrosis, where the only sentience in the High Beyond is the Blight.

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And since we are speculating, we’ll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption. If the Blight has the potential for taking over all the Top in a permanent stability, then why has this not happened before? Our guess is that the Blight has been instantiated before (with such dire consequence that the event marks the beginning of recorded time), but it has its own peculiar natural enemy.

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The luckless humans of Straumli Realm chanced on such an archive, no doubt a ruin long off the Net. They instantiated the Blight and incidentally—perhaps a little later—the defense program. Somehow that Blight’s enemy escaped destruction. And the Blight has been searching for it ever since—in all the wrong places. In its weakness, the new instance of the defense retreated to depths no Power would think of penetrating, whence it could never return without outside help.

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Maybe it was a mistake, but take what advantage there is in it. If they are to be saved because you think they are allies, then treat them as allies. Treat them as the friends they are. We are all pawns together.

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Instead 
 it was almost like the old Pham, from before Harmonious Repose. He let them enter the command deck, he made no comment when Ravna set herself carefully between himself and the Riders. He listened without interruption while Ravna explained what Greenstalk had said. “These two are safe, Pham. And without their help we’ll not make it to the Bottom.” He nodded, looked away at the windows. Some showed natural starscape; most were ultratrace displays, the closest thing to a picture of the enemies that were closing on the OOB. His calm expression broke for just an instant, and the Pham that loved her seemed to stare out, desperate: “And you really believe all this, Rav? How?” Then the lid was back on, his expression distant and neutral. “Never mind. Certainly it’s true; without all of us working together we’ll never make it to Tines World. Blueshell, I accept your offer. Subject to cautious safeguards, we work together.” Till I can safely dispose of you, Ravna could feel the unsaid words behind his blandness. Showdown deferred.

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Decades of travel time, mostly in coldsleep. Such had been the world of the Qeng Ho, the world of Pham’s memories. Ravna let out a shuddering breath that ended in weak laughter. For Pham, the terrible pressure was abated, at least temporarily. He could be human.

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Flenser could chat for casual pleasure, all the while mixing truth with lies. One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

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Tyrathect’s assault had left her defenseless. The innermost mental barriers around her three members were suddenly as thin as the skin of an overripe fruit. Flenser slashed through the membrane, pawed at the flesh of her mind, spattering it across his own. The three who had been her core would still live, but never again would they have a soul separate from his.

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Injured singletons were at the bottom of all medical priorities. “There’s not much left to save in such cases,” one medic had said to her, via Pilgrim. “And even if there was, would you want a crippled, loose-bonded member in your self?” The fellow had been too tired to notice the absurdity of his question.

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Even crippled, they could be an advantage to a pack,” he’d said to her. “I’ve been crippled off and on in my travels; you can’t always pick and choose when you’re down to three and you’re a thousand miles into an unknown land.”

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For days, the human had been in contact with these patients, even Kratzi. No Tinish doctor could approach and touch them like the Two-Legs. Even some whole packs felt the effect; for fragments it must be overwhelming. In their inner soul, most of the patients considered the alien part of themselves.

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Funny. Almost a year ago Pilgrim and Scriber were dragging me around, and I was even worse hurt, and terrified of everything—including them. And now 
 she had never been so glad to see another person. Even Scarbutt was a reassuring strength walking beside her.

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Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

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the Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms or [hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores.

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Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.”

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Pham grunted. “Okay then. Get us in the air, Blueshell.” It felt good to kiss subtlety goodbye.

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If I can not have Heaven, at least I can still take them to Hell.

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“Student.” “Master.” Steel smiled. All five of the others were here; the fragment had smuggled himself all back. But gone were the radio cloaks. The members stood naked, their pelts covered with oozing sores. The radio bomb would be useless. Perhaps it didn’t matter; Steel had seen corpses that looked healthier than these. Out of sight he raised his bows. “I have come to kill you.” The death’s heads shrugged. “You have come to try.”

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Quick glance behind him. “We’re okay,” he gasped. “Woodcarver’s packs are tearing up Steel’s. But Blueshell—” He peered between in the shields. It was like looking into a kiln. Right by the castle wall there might be a breathing space. A slim hope, but— “Something is moving in there.” Pilgrim had tucked one head briefly around the shield. He withdrew it now, licking his nose from both sides. Pham looked again through the crack. The fire had internal shadows, places of not-so-bright that wavered 
 moved? “I see it too.” He felt Johanna stick her head close to his, peering frantically. “It’s Blueshell, Rav.
 By the Fleet.” This last said too softly to carry over the fire sound. There was no sign of Jefri Olsndot, but “Blueshell’s rolling through the middle of the fire, Rav.” The skrode wheeled out of the deeper oil. Slowly, steadily making its way. And now Pham could see fire within fire, Blueshell’s trunk flaring in rivulets of flame. His fronds were no longer gathered into himself. They extended, writhing with their own fire. “He’s still coming, driving straight out.” The skrode cleared the wall of fire, rolled with jerky abandon down the slope. Blueshell didn’t turn toward them, but just before he reached the landing boat, all six wheels grated to a fast stop.

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Pham came to his knees and looked back at the castle. The fire was a little lower now. He stared a long time at the blackened stump that had been Blueshell. Wondering and remembering. Wondering if all the suspicion had been for naught. Wondering what mix of courage and autopilot had been behind the rescue. Remembering all the months he had spent with Blueshell, the liking and then the hate—Oh, Blueshell, my friend.

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It’s always amusing to see people who think themselves the center of the universe. Take the recent spread of the Blight [references follow for readers not on those threads and newsgroups]. The Blight is an unprecedented change in a limited portion of the Top of the Beyond—far away from most of my readers. I’m sure it’s the ultimate catastrophe for many, and I certainly feel sympathy for such, but a little humor too, that these people somehow think their disaster is the end of everything. Life goes on, folks.

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Often before, I have called this the Net of a Million Lies. Well, people, we now have an opportunity to view things while the truth is still manifest. With luck we may solve some fundamental mysteries about the Zones and the Powers.

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This is all very expensive, but worth it, the observation of the aeon. And the expense will not continue long. The Blight’s fleet should arrive at the target star momentarily. Will it stop and retrieve? Or will we see how a Power destroys the systems which oppose it? Either way, we are blessed with opportunity.

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Downslope, the OOB lay like a great, dying moth. Its topside drive spines arched a hundred meters into the air. They glistened a wet, metallic green. Their landing had not quite been a crash. Even now, agrav cancelled some of the craft’s weight. But the drive spines on the ground side were crumpled. Beyond the ship, the hillside fell steeply away to the water and the islands. The westering sun cast hazy shadows across the islands and on the castle beyond the straits. A fantasy scene of castles and starships.

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The hope and fear came suddenly out of hiding: hope that maybe, even now, godshatter could do something about the Blight; and fear, that Pham would die in the process.

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Enemy speed had jumped to twenty light-years per hour, as fast as might be expected in the Middle Beyond. What had been almost two days of grace was barely two hours.
 Now the display said twenty-five light-years per hour. Thirty. Someone was pounding on the hatch.

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If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.

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“The surge. So big. It makes what hit us before seem a gentle wave. This is the one nobody believes, because no one’s left to record it. The Bottom will be blown out beyond the fleet.”

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it was like 
 Pham stood with Old One on a vast and empty beach. Ravna and Tines were tiny creatures at their feet. Planets and stars were the grains of sand. And the sea had drawn briefly back, letting the brightness of thought reach here where before had been darkness. The Transcendence would be brief. At the horizon, the drawn-back sea was building, a dark wall higher than any mountain, rushing back upon them. He looked up at the enormity of it. Pham and godshatter and Countermeasure would not survive that submergence, not even separately. They had triggered catastrophe beyond mind, a vast section of the galaxy plunged into Slowness, as deep as Old Earth itself, and as permanent.

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Yes, I built you from several bodies in the junkyard by Relay. But there was only one mind and one set of memories that I could revive. A strong, brave wolf—so strong I could never control you without first casting you into doubt.