A Fire Upon the Deep

"— Old One just kept asking for more and more. When we finally figured things out, and confronted him… Well, we came close to threatening violence. We have the resources to destroy his emissary vessel. No telling what his revenge might be, but we told Old One his demands were already destroying us. Thank the Powers, he just seemed amused; he backed off. He's restricted to a single transceiver now, and that's on a signal search that has nothing to do with us."

Hmm. One mystery solved. Old One must have been snooping around The Wandering Company and overheard the Skroderiders' story. "Maybe things will be okay, then. But it's important to be just as tough if Old One tries to abuse us again." The words were already out of her mouth before she considered who she was giving advice to.

Grondr didn't seem to notice. If anything, he was the one scrambling to agree: "Yes, yes. I'll tell you, if Old One were any ordinary customer, we'd blacklist him forever for this deception… But then if he were ordinary, he could never have fooled us."

Grondr wiped pudgy white fingers across his face. "No mere Beyonder could have altered our record of the dredge expedition. Not even one from the Top could have broken into the junkyard and manipulated the remains without our even suspecting."

Dredge? Remains? Ravna began to see that she and Grondr were not talking about the same thing. "Just what did Old One do?"

"The details? We're pretty sure of them now. Since the Fall of Straum, Old One has been very interested in humans. Unfortunately, there were no willing ones available here. It began manipulating us, rewriting our junkyard records. We've recovered a clean backup from a branch office: The dredge really did encounter the wreck of a human ship; there were human body parts in it — but nothing that we could have revived. Old One must have mixed and matched what it found there. Perhaps it fabricated memories by extrapolating from human cultural data in the archives. With hindsight, we can match its early requests with the invasion of our junkyard."

Grondr rattled on, but Ravna wasn't listening. Her eyes stared blindly through the phone's display. 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.

"Not precisely. He is human, and with his fake memories he can operate autonomously. But when Old One buys full bandwidth, the creature is fully an emissary device." The hand and eye of a Power.

Grondr's mouthparts clattered in abject embarrassment. "Ravna, we don't know all that happened last night; there was no reason to have you under close surveillance. But Old One assures us that its need for direct investigation is over. In any case, we'll never give him the bandwidth to try again."

Ravna barely nodded. Her face suddenly felt cold. She had never felt such anger and such fright at the same time. She stood in a wave of dizziness and walked away from the phone, ignoring Grondr's worried cries. The stories from grad school came tumbling through her mind, and the myths of a dozen human religions. Consequences, consequences. Some of them she could defend against; others were past repair.

And from somewhere in the back of her mind, an incredibly silly thought crawled out from under the horror and the rage. For eight hours she had been face to face with a Power. It was the sort of experience that made a chapter in textbooks, the sort of thing that was always far away and misreported. And it was the sort of thing no one in all of Sjandra Kei could come near to claiming. Until now.

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush CHAPTER 10

Johanna was in the boat for a long time. The sun never set, though now it was low behind her, now it was high in front, now all was cloudy and rain plinked off the tarp covering her blankets. She spent the hours in an agonized haze. Things happened that could only have been dreams. There were creatures pulling at her clothes, blood sticking everywhere. Gentle hands and rat snouts dressed her wounds, and forced chill water down her throat. When she thrashed around, Mom rearranged her blankets and comforted her with the strangest sounds. For hours, someone warm lay beside her. Sometimes it was Jefri; more often it was a large dog, a dog that purred.

The rain passed. The sun was on the left side of the boat, but hidden behind a cold, snapping shadow. More and more, the pain became divisible. Part of it was in her chest and shoulder; that stabbed through her whenever the boat wobbled. Part of it was in her gut, an emptiness that was not quite nausea… she was so hungry, so thirsty.

More and more, she was remembering, not dreaming. There were nightmares that would never go away. They had really happened. They were happening now.