A Fire Upon the Deep

The redhead's lazy smile broadened. "Ah, but you see, I've already named my price, and I think Vrinimi can meet it."

I really wish I could do something about that smile, thought Ravna. Pham Nuwen's ticket to the Transcend was based on a Power's sudden interest in the Straumli perversion. This innocent's ego might end up smeared across a million death cubes, running a million million simulations of human nature.

Grondr called less than five minutes after Pham Nuwen's departure. Ravna knew the Org would be eavesdropping, and she'd already told Grondr her misgivings about this "selling" of a sophont. Nevertheless, she was a bit nervous to see him.

"When is he actually going to leave for the Transcend?"

Grondr rubbed at his freckles. He didn't seem angry. "Not for ten or twenty days. The Power that's negotiating for him is more interested in looking at our archives and watching what's passing through Relay. Also… despite the human's enthusiasm for going, he's really quite cautious."

"Oh?"

"Yes. He's insisting on a library budget, and permission to roam anywhere in the system. He's been chatting with random employees all over the Docks. He was especially insistent about talking to you." Grondr's mouth parts clicked in a smile. "Feel free to speak your mind to him. Basically, he's tasting around for hidden poison. Hearing the worst from you should make him trust us."

She was coming to understand Grondr's confidence. Damn but Pham Nuwen had a thick head. "Yes sir. He's asked me to show him around the Foreign Quarter tonight." As you well know.

"Fine. I wish the rest of the deal were going as smoothly." Grondr turned so that only peripheral freckles were looking in her direction. He was surrounded by status displays of the Org's communication and database operations. From what she could see, things were remarkably busy. "Maybe I should not bring this up, but it's just possible you can help… Business is very brisk." Grondr did not seem pleased to report the good news. "We have nine civilizations from the Top of the Beyond that are bidding for wide band data feeds. That we could handle. But this Power that sent a ship here…"

Ravna interrupted almost without thinking, a breach that would have horrified her a few days earlier. "Just who is it, by the way? Any chance we're entertaining the Straumli Perversion?" The thought of that taking the redhead was a chill.

"Not unless all the Powers are fooled, too. Marketing calls our current visitor 'Old One'." He smiled. "That's something of a joke, but true even so. We've known it for eleven years." No one really knew how long Transcendent beings lived, but it was a rare Power that stayed communicative for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something different — or really did die. There were a million explanations, thousands that were allegedly from the Powers first hand. Ravna guessed that the true explanation was the simplest one: 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.

So calling an eleven-year Power "Old One" was almost reasonable.

"We believe that Old One is a variant on the Type 73 pattern. Such are rarely malicious — and we know from whom it Transcended. Just now it's causing us major discomfort, though. For twenty days it has been monopolizing an enormous and increasing percentage of Relay bandwidth. Since its ship arrived, it's been all over the archive and our local nets. We've asked Old One to send noncritical data by starship, but it refuses. This afternoon was the worst yet. Almost five percent of Relay's capacity was bound up in its service. And the creature is sending almost as much downlink as it is receiving uplink."

That was weird, but, "It's still paying for the business, isn't it? If Old One can pay top price, why do you care?"

"Ravna, we hope our Organization will be around for many years after the Old One is gone. There is nothing it could offer us that would be good through all that time." Ravna nodded. Actually, there were certain "magic" automations that might work down here, but their long-term effectiveness would be dubious. This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course. "Old One can easily top any bid from the Middle Beyond. But if we give it all the services it demands, we'll be effectively nonfunctional to the rest of our customers — and they are the people we must depend on in the future."