CHAPTER 9

Note

!QU Does Ravna seem too blasé about the fate of Straumli Realm? 
!QU Is it too crass that she didn't go running off to Grondr the night 
! before with news of the refugee ship? If so, how to make it not crass? 

Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly around ... a large pillow. Damn. He'd already left. She lay back for a second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last night she hadn't realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense ... what a strange thing.

The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive nonsense. "Yes?"

It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? "I'm sorry to bother you, Ravna, but -- are you all right?" The Rider interrupted herself.

Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange: sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. "Yes, I'm fine." Fine! "What's up?"

"We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were so highly placed. We'd been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we were told the survey is being undertaken immediately."

"Um." Say what? "That's wonderful, but I'm not sure I -- who's paying for it, anyway?"

"I don't know, but it is expensive. We were told they're dedicating a backbone transceiver to the search. If there's anyone transmitting, we should know in a matter of hours."

They chatted for a few more minutes, Ravna gradually becoming more coherent as she parceled the various aspects of the last ten hours into business and pleasure. She had half expected the Org to bug her at The Wandering Company. Maybe Grondr just heard the story there -- and gave it full credit. But just yesterday, he'd been wimping about transceiver saturation. Either way, this was good news -- perhaps extraordinarily good. If the Riders' wild story were true, the Straumli Perversion might be less than Transcendent. And if the refugee ships had some clues on how to bring it down, Straumli Realm might even be saved.

After Greenstalk rang off, Ravna wandered about the apartment, getting herself in shape, playing the various possibilities against each other. Her actions became more purposeful, almost up to their usual speed. There were a lot of things she wanted to check into.

Note

!QU Implausible that Grondr would have allowed his phone image to look 
! disheveled? 
! Possible SOLN RETROwrite a comment about his looking so unflappable 
! that he probably didn't even have phone disguises [weak and awkward] 

Then the phone was ringing again. This time she previewed the caller. Oops! It was Grondr Vrinimikalir. She combed her hand back through her hair; it still looked like crap, and this phone was not up to deception. Suddenly she noticed that Grondr didn't look so hot either. His facial chitin was smudged, even across some of his freckles. She accepted the call.

"Ah!" His voice actually squeaked, then returned to its normal level. "Thank you for answering. I would have called earlier, except things have been very ... chaotic." Just where had his cool distance gone? "I just want you to know that the Org had nothing to do with this. We were totally taken in until just a couple of hours ago." He launched into a disjointed description of massive demand swamping the Org's resources.

As he rambled, Ravna punched up a summary of recent Relay business. By the Powers that Be: Sixty percent diversion? Excerpts from Comm Costs: She scanned quickly down the item from Windsong. The gasbags were as pompous as ever, but their offer to replace Relay was probably for real. It was just the sort of thing Grondr had been afraid might happen.

"-- 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.

Note

!hld Old One should need all that much bandwidth for two-way sensory 
!hld tap on a human. Raw receptor bandwidth is probably about 500Mbyte/s 
!hld, much less if tapinto post processing stages of the brain 

"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."

Note

!QU How about a little nausea here? NÆH June 12, 1991 
!jdv       Who was having sex? Why? Who was that masked man? 
!jdv          Did Pham have a good time? 
!V          ||||||||||||||||||||||||||I've tried to do that in c16.txt 
!V  now. 

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.

Note

!V June 12, 1991 leaving following as FRAG, because it makes the jolly
!V   last paragraph seem more out of place:
!      ; how much of her could Old One have copied? 

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.

Note

!QU May want to strengthen reference to refugee ship in this last scene?
!jrf      YES!
!V      |||| Now I don't understand my question or your answer 
!V Hm, maybe this is where jrf wanted limited dialog with Jefri?
!
!QU Does this ending make Ravna appear too shallow? 
!jrf      YES!!   
!V      ||||| I think I've improved this some. Should I go further 
!V by deleting her speculation that this could improve 
!V her academic standing? 
!
!jrf What religion stuff? (I must be missing something here.) 
!V Eg, Mary 
!jrf2 "Mary" ... Well yes, but 
!jrf2    1) presumably Ravna takes precautions, and 
!jrf2    2) This is utterly unlike the general notion of god and woman. 
!jrf2       Cloaked in human rags of Pham was a Power, not a God. 
!jrf2       There's a mechanistic device here, not a mystical presence. 
!jrf2    V: Still seems to me at least like some of the cloaked 
!jrf2    V:   encounters with Roman gods. 
!jrf2  
!jrf2 This ending of the chapter you have now is better. The  
!jrf2    speculation is, I think, kind of neat, if you make it a little  
!jrf2    serious by making her pause before thinking of it, so it's 
!jrf2    more an afterthought.