"Not many have. Not that it's a secret; it's just we don't make much of it. It comes close to being religion, but one we don't proselytize. Four or five billion years ago, Someone built the first skrodes and raised the first Riders to sentience. That much is verified fact. The Myth is that something destroyed our Creator and all its works... A catastrophe so great that from this distance it is not even understood as an act of mind."

There were plenty of theories about what the galaxy had been like in the distant past, in the time of the Ur-Partition. But the Net couldn't be forever. There had to be a beginning. Ravna had never been a big believer in Ancient Wars and Catastrophes.

"So in a sense," Greenstalk said, "we Riders are the faithful ones, waiting for What created us to return. The traditional skrode and the traditional interface are a standard. Staying with it has made our patience possible."

"Quite so," said Blueshell. "And the design itself is very subtle, My Lady, even if the function is simple." He rolled to the center of the ceiling. "The skrode of tradition imposes a good discipline-concentration on what's truly important. Just now I was trying to worry about too many things..." Abruptly he returned to the topic at hand: "Two of our drive spines never recovered from the damage at relay. Three more appear to be degrading. We thought this slow progress was just the storm, but now I've studied the spines up close. The diagnostic warnings were no false alarm."

"...and it's still getting worse?"

"Unfortunately so."

"So how bad will it get?"

Blueshell drew all his tendrils together. "My Lady Ravna, we can't be certain of the extrapolations yet. It may not get much worse than now, or-You know the OOB was not fully ready for departure. There were the final consistency checks still to do. In a way, I worry about that more than anything. We don't know what bugs may lurk, especially when we reach the Bottom and our normal automation must be retired. We must watch the drives very carefully ... and hope."

It was the nightmare that haunted travelers, especially at the Bottom of the Beyond: with ultradrive gone, suddenly a light-year was not a matter of minutes but of years. Even if they fired up the ramscoop and went into cold sleep, Jefri Olsndot would be a thousand years dead before they reached him, and the secret of his parents' ship buried in some medieval midden.

Pham Nuwen waved at the slowly shifting star fields. "Still, this is the Beyond. Every hour we go farther than the fleet of Qeng Ho could in a decade." He shrugged. "Surely there's some place we can get repairs?"

"Several."

So much for "a quick flight, all unobserved". Ravna sighed. The final fitting at Relay was to include spares and Bottom compatibility software. All that was faraway might-have-beens now. She looked at Greenstalk. "Do you have any ideas?"

"About what?" Greenstalk said.

Ravna bit her lip in frustration. Some said the Riders were a race of comedians; they were indeed, but it was mostly unintentional.

Blueshell rattled at his mate.

"Oh! You mean where can we get help. Yes, there are several possibilities. Sjandra Kei is thirty-nine hundred lights spinward from here, but outside this storm. We-"

"Too far," Blueshell and Ravna spoke almost in chorus.

"Yes, yes, but remember. The Sjandra Kei worlds are mainly human, your home, my lady Ravna. And Blueshell and I know them well; after all, they were the source of the crypto shipment we brought to Relay. We have friends there and you a family. Even Blueshell agrees that we can get the work done without notice there."

"Yes, if we could get there." Blueshell's voder voice sounded petulant.

"Okay, what are the other choices?"

"They are not so well-known. I'll make a list." Her fronds drifted across a console. "Our last chance for choice is rather near our planned course. It's a single system civilization. The Net name is ... it translates as Harmonious Repose."

"Rest in Peace, eh?" said Pham.

But they had agreed to voyage on quietly, always watching the bad drive spines, postponing the decision to stop for help.

The days became weeks, and weeks slowly counted into months. Four voyagers on a quest toward the Bottom. The drive became worse, but slowly, right on OOB's diagnostic projections.

The Blight continued to spread across the Top of the Beyond, and its attacks on Network archives extended far beyond its direct reach.

Communication with Jefri was improving. Messages trickled in at the rate of one or two a day. Sometimes, when OOB's antenna swarm was tuned just right, he and Ravna would talk almost in real time. Progress was being made on the Tines' world, faster than she had expected-perhaps fast enough that the boy could save himself.

It should have been a hard time, locked up in the single ship with just three others, with only a thread of communication to the outside, and that with a lost child.

In any case, it was rarely boring. Ravna found that each of them had plenty to do. For herself it was managing the ship's library, coaxing out of it the plans that would help Mr. Steel and Jefri. OOB's library was nothing compared to the Archive at Relay, or even the university libraries at Sjandra Kei, but without proper search automation it could be just as unknowable. And as their voyage proceeded, that automation need more and more special care.

And ... things could never be boring with Pham around. He had a dozen projects, and curiosity about everything. "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." He was learning Samnorsk. It went slower than his faked learning on Relay, but the guy had a natural bent for languages, and Ravna gave him plenty of practice.

He spent several hours each day in the OOB's workshop, often with Blueshell. Reality graphics were a new thing to him, but after a few weeks he was beyond toy prototypes. The pressure suits he built had power packs and weapons stores. "We don't know what things may be like when we arrive; powered armor could be real useful."

At the end of each work day they would all meet on the command deck, to compare notes, to consider the latest from Jefri and Mr. Steel, to review the drive status. For Ravna this could be the happiest time of the day ... and sometimes the hardest. Pham had rigged the display automation to show castle walls all around. A huge fireplace replaced the normal window on comm status. The sound of it was almost perfect; he had even coaxed a small amount of "fire" heat from that wall. This was a castle hall out of Pham's memory, from Canberra he said. But it wasn't that different from the Age of Princesses on Nyjora (though most of those castles had been in tropical swamps, where big fireplaces were rarely used). For some perverse reason, even the Riders seemed to enjoy it; Greenstalk said it reminded her of a trading stop from her first years with Blueshell. Like travelers who have walked through a long day, the four of them rested in the coziness of a phantom lodge. And when the new business was settled, Pham and the Riders would trade stories, often late into the "night".

Ravna sat beside him, the least talkative of the four. She joined in the laughter and sometimes the discussion: There was the time Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption, and Ravna knew some stories of her own to illustrate the Rider's opinion. But this was also the hardest time for her. Yes, the stories were wonderful. Blueshell and Greenstalk had been so many places, and at heart they were traders. Swindles and bargains and good done were all part of their lives. Pham listened to his friends, almost enraptured ... and then told his own stories, of being a prince on Canberra, of being a Slow Zone trader and explorer. And for all the limitations of the Slowness, his life's adventures surpassed even the Skroderiders'. Ravna smiled and tried to pretend enthusiasm.

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.

And Old One's jape was all so unnecessary. Pham didn't have to be a great hero. He was a decent person, though ebullient and kind of a rule-breaker. He had every bit as much persistance as she, and more courage.

What craft Old One must have had to make such a person, what ... Power. And how she hated Him, for making a joke of such a person.

Of Pham's godshatter, there was scarcely a sign. For that Ravna was very grateful. Once or twice a month he had a dreamy spell. For a day or two after he would go nuts with some new project, often something he couldn't clearly explain. But it wasn't getting worse; he wasn't drifting away from her.

"And the godshatter may save us in the end," he would say when she had the courage to ask him about it. "No, I don't know how." He tapped his forehead. "It's still god's own crowded attic up here. "It's more than memory. Sometimes it needs all my mind to think with and there's no room left for self-awareness, and afterwards I can't explain, but... sometimes I have a glimmer. Whatever Jefri's parents brought to the Tines' world: it can hurt the Blight. Call it an antidote-better yet, a countermeasure. Something taken from the Perversion as it was aborning in the Straumli lab. Something the Perversion didn't even suspect was gone until much later."

Ravna sighed. It was hard to imagine good news that was also so frightening. "The Straumers could sneak something like that right out from the Perversion's heart?"

"Maybe. Or maybe, Countermeasure used the Straumers to escape the Perversion. To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the plan might work, Rav, at least if I-if Old One's godshatter-can get down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of the Beyond upside down-hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it's looking in all the wrong places. We'll have our chance at Countermeasure."

She thought of Jefri's messages. "The rot on the walls of Jefri's ship. You think that's what it is?"

Pham's eyes went vague. "Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He seems a little disgusted by it... That's good, probably keeps his Tinish friends away from it."

A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham's mind too. And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would stand before that unknown and Old One's dead hand would act ... through Pham. Ravna shivered, and didn't say anything more for a time.

Month by month, the gunpowder project stayed right on the schedule of the library's development program. The Tines had been able to make the stuff easily; there had been very little backtracking through the development tree. Alloy testing had been the critical event that slowed things, but they were over the hump there too. The packs of "Hidden Island" had built the first three prototypes: breech-loading cannon that were small enough to be carried by a single pack. Jefri guessed they could begin mass production in another ten days.

The radio project was the weird one. In one sense it was behind schedule; in another, it had become something more than Ravna had ever imagined. After a long period of normal progress, Jefri had come back with a counterplan. It consisted of a complete reworking of the tables for the acoustic interface.

"I thought these jokers were first-time medievals," Pham Nuwen said when he saw Jefri's message.

"That's right. And in principle, they just reasoned out consequences to what we sent them. The want to support pack-thought across the radio."

"Hunh. Yes. We described how the tables specified the transducer grid-all in nontechnical Samnorsk. That included showing how small table changes would make the grid different. But look, our design would give them a three kilohertz band-a nice, voice-grade connection. You're telling me that implementing this new table would give'em two hundred kilohertz."

"Yes. That's what my dataset says."

He grinned his cocky smile. "Ha! And that's my point. Sure, in principle we gave them enough information to do the mod. It looks to me like making this expanded spec table is equivalent to solving a, hmm," he counted rows and columns, "a five-hundred-node numerical PDE. And little Jefri claims that all his datasets are destroyed, and that his ship computer is not generally usable."

Ravna leaned back from the display. "Sorry. I see what you mean." You get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget what it must be like without them. "You ... you think this might be, uh, Countermeasure's doing?"

Pham Nuwen hesitated, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility. Then, "No ... no, it's not that. I think this 'Mister Steel' is playing games with our heads. All we have is a byte stream from 'Jefri'. What do we really know about what's going on?"

"Well, I'll tell you some things I know. We are talking to a young human child who was raised in Straumli Realm. You've been reading most of his messages in Trisk translation. That loses a lot of the colloquialisms and the little errors of a child who is a native speaker of Samnorsk. The only way this might be faked is by a group of human adults... And after twenty plus weeks of knowing Jefri, I'll tell you even that is unlikely."

"Okay. So suppose Jefri is for real. We have this eight-year-old kid down on the Tines' world. He's telling us what he considers to be the truth. I'm saying it looks like someone is lying to him. Maybe we can trust what he sees with his own eyes. He says these creatures aren't sapient except in groups of five or so. Okay. We'll believe that." Pham rolled his eyes. Apparently his reading had shown how rare group intelligences were this side of the Transcend. "The kid says they didn't see anything but small towns from space, and that everything on the ground is medieval. Okay, we'll buy that. But. What are the chances that this race is smart enough to do PDE's in their heads, and do them from just the implications in your message?"

"Well, there have been some humans that smart." She could name one case in Nyjoran history, another couple from Old Earth. If such abilities were common among the packs, they were smarter than any natural race she had heard of. "So this isn't first-time medievalism?"

"Right. I bet this is some colony fallen on hard times-like your Nyjora and my Canberra, except that they have the good luck of being in the Beyond. These dog packs have a working computer somewhere. Maybe it's under control of their priest class; maybe they don't have much else. But they're holding out on us."

"But why? We'd be helping them in any case. And Jefri has told us how this group saved him."

Pham started to smile again, the old supercilious smile. Then he sobered. He was really trying to break that habit. "You've been on a dozen different worlds, Ravna. And I know you've read about thousands more, at least in survey. You probably know of varieties of medievalism I've never guessed. But remember, I've actually been there... I think." The last was a nervous mutter.

"I've read about the Age of Princesses," Ravna said mildly.

"Yes... and I'm sorry for belittling that. In any medieval politics, the blade and the thought are closely connected. But they become much more closely bound for someone who's lived through it. Look, even if we believe everything that Jefri says he has seen, this Hidden Island Kingdom is a sinister thing."

"You mean the names?"

"Like Flensers, Steel, Tines? Harsh names aren't necessarily meaningful." Pham laughed. "I mean, when I was eight years old, one of my titles was already 'Lord Master Disemboweler'." He saw the look on Ravna's face and hurriedly added, "And at that age, I hadn't even witnessed more than a couple of executions! No, the names are only a small part of it. I'm thinking of the kid's description of the castle-which seems to be close by the ship-and this ambush he thinks he was rescued from. It doesn't add up. You asked 'what could they gain from betraying us'. I can see that question from their point of view. If they are a fallen colony, they have a clear idea what they've lost. They probably have some remnant technology, and are paranoid as hell. If I were them, I'd seriously consider ambushing the rescuers if those rescuers seemed weak or careless. And even if we come on strong ... look at the questions Jefri asks for Steel. The guy is fishing, trying to figure out what we really value: the refugee ship, Jefri and the coldsleepers, or something on the ship. By the time we arrive, Steel will probably have wiped the local opposition-thanks to us. My guess is we're in for some heavy blackmail when we get to Tines' world."

I thought we were talking about the good news. Ravna paged back through recent messages. Pham was right. The boy was telling the truth as he knew it, but... "I don't see how we can play things any differently. If we don't help Steel against the Woodcarvers-"

"Yeah. We don't know enough to do much else. Whatever else is true, the Woodcarvers seem a valid threat to Jefri and the ship. I'm just saying we should be thinking about all the possibilities. One thing we absolutely mustn't do is show interest in Countermeasure. If the locals know how desperate we are for that, we don't have a chance.

"And it may be time to start planting a few lies of our own. Steel's been talking about building a landing place for us-within his castle. There's no way OOB could fit, but I think we should play along, tell Jefri that we can separate from our ultradrive, something like his container ship. Let Steel concentrate on building harmless traps..."

He hummed one of his strange little "marching" tunes. "About the radio thing: why don't we compliment the Tines real casually for improving our design. I wonder what they'd say?"

Pham Nuwen got his answer less than three days later. Jefri Olsndot said that he had done the optimization. So if you believed the kid, there was no evidence for hidden computers. Pham was not at all convinced: "So just by coincidence, we have Isaac Newton on the other end of the line?" Ravna didn't argue the point. It was an enormous bit of luck, yet... She went over the earlier messages. In language and general knowledge, the boy seemed very ordinary for his age. But occasionally there were situations involving mathematical insight-not formal, taught math-where Jefri said striking things. Some of those conversations had been under fine conditions, with turnaround times of less than a minute. It all seemed too consistent to be the lie Pham Nuwen thought.

Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.

There was always something: problems with the Tines' developments, fears that the murderous Woodcarvers might attack Mr. Steel, worries about the steadily degrading drive spines and Zone turbulence that slowed OOB's progress even further. Life was by turns and at once frustrating, boring, frightening. And yet ...

One night about four months into the flight, Ravna woke in the cabin she had come to share with Pham. Maybe she had been dreaming, but she couldn't remember anything except that it had been no nightmare. There was no special noise in the room, nothing to wake her. Beside her, Pham was sleeping soundly in their hammock net. She eased her arm down his back, drawing him gently toward her. His breathing changed; he mumbled something placid and unintelligible. In Ravna's opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone ... that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring and effortless.

Ravna looked around the dimly-lit cabin, trying to imagine what had woken her. Maybe it had just been the problems of the day-Powers knew there had been enough of those. She nestled her face against Pham's shoulder. Yes, always problems, but ... in a way she 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.

TWENTY-SIX.

And finally, almost five months out, it was clear there was no hope of going on without repairing the drive spines. The OOB was suddenly doing only a quarter of a light-year per hour in a volume that tested good for two. And things were getting worse. They would have no trouble making it to Harmonious Repose, but beyond that...

Harmonious Repose. An ugly name, thought Ravna. Pham's "light-hearted" translation was worse: Rest In Peace. In the Beyond, almost everything habitable was in use. Civilizations were transient and races faded ... but there were always new people moving up from Below. The result was most often patchwork, polyspecific systems. Young races just up from the Slowness lived uneasily with the remnants of older peoples. According to the ship's library, RIP had been in the Beyond for a long time. It had been continuously inhabited for at least two hundred million years, time for ten thousand species to call it home. The most recent notes showed better than one hundred racial terranes. Even the youngest was the residue of a dozen emigrations. The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.

So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they'd be able to listen to the News the whole way in.

Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious, hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users. Too bad we can't follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible methods of payment.

Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in: Crypto: 0 Syntax: 43 As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of existence before the Fall of the Realm.]

Subject: Call to action Distribution:

Threat of the Blight

War Trackers Interest Group

Homo Sapiens Interest Group

Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay Key phrases: Action, not talk Text of message: Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will need support services including free Net time.

In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of victory-or wait, and be destroyed.

Death to vermin.

There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups. Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that way.

Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they do after all?"

Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began... By the Powers, I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than she realized. Now...

On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."