"All this you could read in the Threats news group. But there is another item, something I ask you to keep secret for now: Five days ago, a ship from the Transcend entered our region. It claims to be directly controlled by a Power." The wall behind him became a window upon the visitor. The craft was an irregular collection of spines and limps. A scale bar claimed the thing was only five meters across.

Ravna felt the hair on her neck prickling. Here in the Middle Beyond they should be relatively safe from the caprice of the Powers. Still ... the visit was an unnerving thing. "What does it want?"

"Information about the Straumli perversion. In particular, it is very interested in your race. It would give a great deal to take back a living human..."

Ravna's response was abrupt. "I'm not interested."

Grondr spread his pale hands. The light glittered from the chitin on the back of his fingers. "It would be an enormous opportunity. A 'prenticeship with the gods. This one has promised to establish an oracle here in return."

"No!" Ravna half rose from her chair. She was one human, more than twenty thousand light-years from home. That had been a frightening thing in the first days of her 'prenticeship. Since then she had made friends, had learned more of Organization ethics, had come to trust these folk almost as much as people at Sjandra Kei. But ... there was only one halfway trustable oracle on the Net these days, and it was almost ten years old. This Power was tempting Vrinimi Org with fabulous treasure.

Grondr clicked embarrassment. He waved her back to her chair. "It was only a suggestion. We do not abuse our employees. If you will simply serve as our local expert..."

Ravna nodded.

"Good. Frankly, I had not expected you to accept the offer. We have a much more likely volunteer, but one who needs coaching."

"A human? Here?" Ravna had a standing query in the local directory for other humans. During the last two years she had seen three, and they had just been passing through. "How long has she-he?-been here?"

Grondr said something halfway between a smile and a laugh. "A bit more than a century, though we didn't realize it until a few days ago." The pictures around him shifted. Ravna recognized Relay's "attic," the junkyard of abandoned ships and freight devices that floated just a thousand light-seconds from the archives. "We receive a lot of one-way freight, items shipped in the hope we'll buy or sell on consignment." The view closed on a decrepit vessel, perhaps two hundred meters long, wasp-waisted to support a ramscoop drive. Its ultradrive spines were scarcely more than stubs.

"A bottom-lugger?" said Ravna.

Grondr clicked negation. "A dredge. The ship is about thirty thousand years old. Most of that time was spent in a deep penetration of the Slow Zone, plus ten thousand years in the Unthinking Depths."

Up close now, she could see the hull was finely pitted, the result of millennia of relativistic erosion. Even unpiloted, such expeditions were rare: a deep penetration could not return to the Beyond within the lifetime of its builders. Some would not return within the lifetime of the builders'race. People who launched such missions were just a little weird; People who recovered them could make a solid profit.

"This one came from very far away, even if it's not quite a jackpot mission. It didn't see anything interesting in the Unthinking Depths-not surprising given that even simple automation fails there. We sold most of the cargo immediately. The rest we cataloged and forgot ... till the Straumli affair." The starscape vanished. They were looking at a medical display, random limbs and body parts. They looked very human. "In a solar system at the bottom of the Slowness, the dredge found a derelict. The wreck had no ultradrive capability; it was truly a Slow Zone design. The solar system was uninhabited. We speculate the ship had a structural failure-or perhaps the crew was affected by the Depths. Either way, they ended up in a frozen mangle."

Tragedy at the bottom of the Slowness, thousands of years ago. Ravna forced her eyes from the carnage. "You figure on selling this to our visitor?"

"Even better. Once we started poking around, we discovered a substantial error in the cataloging. One of the deaders is almost intact. We patched it up with parts from the others. It was expensive, but we ended up with a living human." The picture flickered again, and Ravna caught her breath. In the medical animation, the parts floated into an orderly arrangement. There was a complete body there, torn up a little in the belly. Pieces came togther, and ... this was no "she". He floated whole and naked, as if in sleep. Ravna had no doubt of his humanity, but all humankind in the Beyond was descended from Nyjoran stock. This fellow had none of that heritage. The skin was smoky gray, not brown. The hair was bright reddish brown, a color she had only seen in pre-Nyjoran histories. The bones of the face were subtly different from modern humans. The small differences were more jarring than the outright alienness of her coworkers.

Now the figure was clothed. Under other circumstances, Ravna would have smiled. Grondr 'Kalir had picked an absurd costume, something from the Nyjoran era. The figure bore a sword and slug gun... A sleeping prince from the Age of Princesses.

"Behold the Ur-human," said Grondr.

SEVEN.

"Relay" is a common place-name. It has meaning in almost any environment. Like Newtown and Newhome, it occurs over and over when people move or colonize or participate in a communication net. You could travel a billion light-years or a billion years and still find such names among folk of natural intelligence.

But in the current era there was one instance of "Relay" known above all others. That instance appeared in the routing list of two percent of all traffic across the Known Net. Twenty thousand light-years off the galactic plane, Relay had an unobstructed line of sight on thirty percent of the Beyond, including many star systems right at the bottom, where starships can make only one light-year per day. A few metal-bearing solar systems were equally well-placed, and there was competition. But where other civilizations lost interest, or colonized into the Transcend, or died in apocalypse, Vrinimi Organization lasted. After fifty thousand years, there were several races of the original Org in its membership. None of those were still leaders-yet the original viewpoint and policies remained. Position and durability: Relay was now the main intermediate to the Magellanics, and one of the few sites with any sort of link to the Beyond in Sculptor.

At Sjandra Kei, Relay's reputation had been fabulous. In her two years of 'prenticeship, Ravna had come to realize that the truth exceeded the reputation. Relay was in Middle Beyond; the Organization's only export was the relay function and access to the local archive. Yet they imported the finest biologicals and processing equipment from the High Beyond. The Relay Docks were an extravagance that only the absolutely rich could indulge. They stretched a thousand kilometers: bays, repair holds, transhipment centers, parks, and playgrounds. Even at Sjandra Kei there were habitats far larger. But the Docks were in no orbit. They floated a thousand kilometers above Groundside on the largest agrav frame Ravna had ever seen. At Sjandra Kei the annual income of an academician might pay for a square meter of agrav fabric-junk that might not last a year. Here there were millions of hectares of the stuff, supporting billions of tonnes. Just replacements for dead fabric required more High Beyond commerce than most star clusters could command.

And now I have my own office here. Working directly for Grondr 'Kalir had its perks. Ravna kicked back in her chair and stared across the central sea. At the Docks' altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above.

She had the surf cranked up this morning-an easy matter of flexing the agravs of the basin. It made a regular crashing against her beach. Even thirty meters from the water there was a tang of salt in the air. Rows of white tops marched off into the distance.

She eyed the figure that was trudging slowly up the beach toward her. Just a few weeks ago she would never have dreamed this situation. Just a few weeks ago she had been out at the archive, absorbed in the upgrade work, happy to be involved with one of the largest databases on the Known Net. Now ... it was almost as if she had come full circle, back to her childhood dreams of adventure. the only problem was, sometimes she felt like one of the bad guys: Pham Nuwen was a living person, not something to be sold.

She stood and walked out to meet her red-haired visitor.

He wasn't carrying the sword and handgun of Grondr's fanciful animation. Yet his clothes were the braided fabric of ancient adventure, and he carried himself with lazy confidence. Since her meeting with Grondr, she had looked up some anthropology from Old Earth. The red hair and the eyefolds had been known there, though rarely in the same individual. Certainly his smoky skin would have been remarkable to an inhabitant of Earth. This fellow was, as much as herself, a product of post-terrestrial evolution.

He stopped an arm's length away and gave her a lopsided grin. "You look pretty human. Ravna Bergsndot?"

She smiled and nodded up at him. "Mr. Pham Nuwen?"

"Yes indeed. We seem both to be excellent guessers." He swept past her into the shade of the inner office. Cocky fellow.

She followed him, unsure about protocol. You'd think with a fellow human there would be no problems...

Actually, the interview went pretty smoothly. It was more than thirty days since Pham Nuwen's resuscitation. Much of that time had been spent in cram language sessions. The fellow must be damned bright; he already spoke Triskweline trade talk with a folksy slickness. He really was rather cute. Ravna had been away from Sjandra Kei for two years, and had another year of her 'prenticeship to go. She'd been doing pretty well. She had many close friends here, Egravan, Sarale. But just chatting with this fellow brought a lot of the loneliness back. In some ways he was more alien than anything at Relay ... and in some ways she wanted to just grab him and kiss his confident grin away.

Grondr Vrinimikalir had been telling the truth about Pham Nuwen. The guy was actually enthusiastic about the Org's plans for him! In theory, that meant she could do her job with a clear conscience. In fact...

"Mr. Nuwen, my job is to orient you to your new world. I know you've been exposed to some intense instruction the last few days, but there are limits to how fast such knowledge can sink in."

The redhead smiled. "Call me Pham. Sure, I feel like an over-stuffed bag. My sleep time is full of little voices. I've learned an awful lot without experiencing anything. Worse, I've been a target for all this 'education'. It's a perfect setup if Vrinimi wants to trick me. That's why I'm learning to use the local library. And that's why I insisted they find someone like you." He saw the surprise on her face. "Ha! You didn't know that. See, talking to a real person gives me a chance to see things that aren't all planned ahead. Also, I've always been a pretty good judge of human nature; I think I can read you pretty well." His grin showed he understood just how irritating he was being.

Ravna looked up at the green petals of the beachtrees. Maybe this boob deserved what he was getting into. "So you have great experience dealing with people?"

"Given the limitations of the Slowness, I've been around, Ravna. I've been around. I know I don't look it, but I'm sixty-seven years old subjective. I thank your Organization for a fine job of thawing me out." He tipped a non-existent hat in her direction. "My last voyage was more than a thousand years objective. I was Programmer-at-Arms on a Qeng Ho longshot-" His eyes abruptly widened, and he said something unintelligible. For a moment he almost looked vulnerable.

Ravna reached a hand toward him. "Memory?"

Pham Nuwen nodded. "Damn. This is something I don't thank you people for."

Pham Nuwen had been frozen in the aftermath of violent death, not as a planned suspension. It was a near miracle that Vrinimi Org had been able to bring him back at all-at least with Middle Beyond technology. But memory was the hardest thing. The chemical basis of memory does not survive chaotic freezing well.

The problem was enough to shrink even Pham Nuwen's ego by a size or two. Ravna took pity on him. "It's not likely that anything is completely lost. You just have to find a different angle on some things."

"...Yes. I've been coached about that. Start with other memories; work sideways toward what you can't remember straight on. Well ... it beats being dead." Some of his jauntiness returned, but subdued to a really quite charming level. They talked for long while as the redhead worked around the points he couldn't "remember straight on".

And gradually Ravna came to feel something she had never expected in connection with a Slow Zoner: awe. In one lifetime, Pham Nuwen had accomplished virtually everything that was possible for a being in the Slowness. All her life she had pitied the civilizations trapped down there. They could never know the glory; they might never know the truth. Yet by luck and skill and sheer strength of will, this fellow had leaped barrier after barrier. Had Grondr known the truth when he pictured the redhead with sword and slug gun? For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian. He had been born on a fallen colony world-Canberra he called it. The place sounded much like medieval Nyjora, though not matriarchal. He'd been the youngest child of a king. He'd grown up with swords and poison and intrigue, living in stone castles by a cold, cold sea. No doubt this littlest prince would have ended up murdered-or king of all-if life had continued in the medieval way. But when he was thirteen years old everything changed. A world that had only legends of aircraft and radio was confronted by interstellar traders. In a year of trading, Canberra's feudal politics was turned on its head.

"Qeng Ho had invested three ships in the expedition to Canberra. They were pissed, thought we'd be at a higher level of technology. We couldn't resupply them, so two stayed behind, probably turned my poor world inside out. I left with the third-a crazy hostage deal my father thought he was putting over on them. I was lucky they didn't space me."

Qeng Ho consisted of several hundred ramscoop ships operating in a volume hundreds of light-years across. Their vessels could reach almost a third of the speed of light. They were mostly traders, occasionally rescuers, even more rarely conquerors. When Pham Nuwen last knew them, they had settled thirty worlds and were almost three thousand years old. It was as extravagant a civilization as can ever exist in the Slowness... And of course, until Pham Nuwen was revived, no one in the Beyond had ever heard of it. 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.

But for a thirteen-year-old boy born to swords and chain mail, the Qeng Ho was more change than most living beings ever experience. In a matter of weeks, he went from medieval lordling to starship cabin boy.

"At first they didn't know what to do with me. Figured on popping me into cold storage and dumping me at the next stop. What can you make of a kid who thinks there's one world and it's flat, who has spent his whole life learning to whack about with a sword?" He stopped abruptly, as he did every few minutes, when the stream of recollection ran into damaged territory. Then his glance flicked out at Ravna, and his smile was as cocky as ever. "I was one mean animal. I don't think civilized people realize what it's like to grow up with your own aunts and uncles scheming to murder you, and you training to get them first. In civilization I met bigger villains-guys who'd fry a whole planet and call it 'reconciliation'-but for sheer up-close treachery, you can't beat my childhood."

To hear Pham Nuwen tell it, only dumb luck saved the crew from his scheming. In the years that followed, he learned to fit in, learned civilized skills. Properly tamed, he could be an ideal ship master of the Qeng Ho. And for many years he was. The Qeng Ho volume contained a couple of other races, and a number of human-colonized worlds. At 0.3c, Pham spent decades in coldsleep getting from star to star, then a year or two at each port trying to make a profit with products and information that might be lethally out-of-date. The reputation of the Qeng Ho was some protection. "Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever" was the fleet's motto, and they had lasted longer than most of their customers. Even religious fanatics grew a little cautious when they thought about Qeng Ho retribution. But more often it was the skill and deviousness of the shipmaster that saved the day. And few were a match for the little boy in Pham Nuwen.

"I was almost the perfect skipper. Almost. I always wanted to see what was beyond the space we had good records on. Every time I got really rich, so rich I could launch my own subfleet-I'd take some crazy chance and lose everything. I was the yo-yo of the Fleet. One run I'd be captain of five, the next I'd be pulling maintenance programming on some damn container ship. Given how time stretches out with sublight commerce, there were whole generations who thought I was a legendary genius-and others who used my name as a synonym for goofball."

He paused and his eyes widened in pleased surprise. "Ha! I remember what I was doing there at the end. I was in the 'goofball' part of my cycle, but it didn't matter. There was this captain of twenty who was even crazier than I... Can't remember her name. Her? Couldn't have been; I'd never serve under a fem captain." He was almost talking to himself. "Anyway, this guy was willing to bet everything on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something like 'wild witless bird'-that gives you the idea about him. He figured there must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere in the universe. The problem was to find them. In a strange way, he had almost guessed about the Zones. Only problem was, he wasn't crazy enough; he got one little thing wrong. Can you guess what?"

Ravna nodded. Considering where Pham's wreck was found, it was obvious.

"Yeah. I'll bet it's an idea older than spaceflight: the 'elder races' must be toward the galactic core, where stars are closer and there are black hole exotica for power. He was taking his entire fleet of twenty. They'd keep going till they found somebody or had to stop and colonize. This captain figured success was unlikely in our lifetime. But with proper planning we could end up in a close-packed region where it would be easy to found a new Qeng Ho-and it would proceed even further.

"Anyway, I was lucky to get aboard even as a programmer; this captain knew all the wrong things about me."

The expedition lasted a thousand years, penetrating two hundred and fifty light-years galactic inward. The Qeng Ho volume was closer to the Bottom of the Slowness than Old Earth, and they were proceeding inwards from there. Even so, it was plain bad luck that they encountered the edge of the Deeps after only two hundred and fifty light-years. One after another, the Wild Witless Bird lost contact with the other ships. Sometimes it happened without warning, other times there was evidence of computer failure or gross incompetence. The survivors saw a pattern, guessed that common components were failing. Of course, no one connected the problems with the region of space they were entering.

"We backed down from ram speeds, found a solar system with a semi-habitable planet. We'd lost track of everybody else... Just what we did then isn't real clear to me." He gave a dry laugh. "We must have been right at the edge, staggering around at about IQ 60. I remember fooling with the life support system. That's probably what actually killed us." For a moment he looked sad and bewildered. He shrugged. "And then I woke up in the tender clutches of Vrinimi Org, here where faster-than-light travel is possible ... and I can see the edge of Heaven itself."

Ravna didn't say anything for a moment. She looked across her beach into the surf. They'd been talking a long time. The sun was peeking under the tree petals, its light shifting across her office. Did Grondr realize what he had here? Almost anything from the Slow Zone had collector's value. People fresh from the Slowness were even more valuable. But Pham Nuwen might be unique. He had personally experienced more than had some whole civilizations, and ventured into the Deeps to boot. She understood now why he looked to the Transcend and called it "Heaven". It wasn't entirely naivete, nor a failure in the Organization's education programs. Pham Nuwen had already been through two transforming experiences, from pre-tech to star-traveler, and star-traveler to Beyonder. Each was a jump almost beyond imagination. Now he saw that another step was possible, and was perfectly willing to sell himself to take it.

So why should I risk my job to change his mind? But her mouth was living a life of its own. "Why not postpone the Transcend, Pham? Take some time to understand what is here in the Beyond. You'd be welcome in almost any civilization. And on human worlds you'd be the wonder of the age."A glimpse of non-Nyjoran humanity. The local newsgroups at Sjandra Kei had thought Ravna radically ambitious to take a 'prenticeship twenty thousand light-years away. Coming back from it, she would have her pick of Full Academician jobs on any of a dozen worlds. That was nothing compared to Pham Nuwen; there were folks so rich they might give him a world if he would just stay. "You could name your price."

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 insistant 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."

His image was replaced by an archive access report. Ravna was very familiar with the format, and Grondr's complaint really hit home. The Known Net was a vast thing, a hierarchical anarchy that linked hundreds of millions of worlds. Yet even the main trunks had bandwidths like something out of Earth's dawn age; a wrist dataset could do better on a local net. That's why bulk access to the Archive was mostly local-to media freighters visiting the Relay system. But now ... during the last hundred hours, remote access to the Archive, both by volume and by count, had been higher than local! And ninety percent of those accesses were from a single account-Old One's.

Grondr's voice continued from behind the graphics. "We've got one backbone transceiver dedicated to this Power right now... Frankly, we can't tolerate this for more than a few days; the ultimate expense is just too great."

Grondr's face was back on the display. "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.

They talked a few minutes about Pham Nuwen, and then Grondr rang off. Afterwards, Ravna took a walk along her beach. The sun was well down toward the aft horizon, and the sand was just pleasantly warm against her feet; the Docks went round the planet once every twenty hours, circling the pole at about forty degrees north latitude. She walked close to the surf, where the sand was flat and wet. The mist off the sea was moist against her skin. The blue sky just above the white-tops shaded quickly to indigo and black. Specks of silver moved up there, agrav floaters bringing starships into the Docks. The whole thing was so fabulously, unnecessarily expensive. Ravna was by turns grossed out and bedazzled. Yet after two years at Relay, she was beginning to see the point. Vrinimi Org wanted the Beyond to know that it had the resources to handle whatever communication and archive demands might be made on it. And they wanted the Beyond to suspect that there were hidden gifts from the Transcend here, things that might make it more than a little dangerous to invaders.

She stared into the spray, feeling it bead on her lashes. So Grondr had the big problem right now: how do you tell a Power to take a walk? All Ravna Bergsndot had to worry about was one overconfident twit who seemed hell-bent on destroying himself. She turned and paralleled the water. Every third wave it surged over her ankles.

She sighed. Pham Nuwen was beyond doubt a twit ... but what an awesome one. Intellectually, she had always known that there was no difference in the possible intelligence of Beyonders and the primitives of the Slowness. Most automation worked better in the Beyond; ultralight communication was possible. But you had to go to the Transcend to build truly superhuman minds. So it shouldn't be surprising that Pham Nuwen was capable. Very capable. He had picked up Triskweline with incredible ease. She had little doubt that he was the master skipper he claimed. And to be a trader in the Slowness, to risk centuries between the stars for a destination that might have fallen from civilization or become deadly hostile to outsiders ... that took courage that was hard to imagine. She could understand how he might think going to the Transcend was just another challenge. He'd had less than twenty days to absorb a whole new universe. That simply wasn't enough time to understand that the rules change when the players are more than human.

Well, he still had a few days of grace. She would change his mind. And after talking to Grondr just now, she wouldn't feel especially guilty about doing it.

EIGHT.

The Foreign Quarter was actually about a third of the Docks. It abutted the no-atmosphere periphery-where ships actually docked-and extended inwards to a section of the central sea. Vrinimi Org had convinced a significant number of races that this was a wonder of the Middle Beyond. In addition to freight traffic there were tourists-some of the wealthiest beings in the Beyond.

Pham Nuwen had carte blanche to these amusements. Ravna took him through the more spectacular ones, including an agrav hop over the Docks. The barbarian was more impressed by their pocket space suits than by the Docks. "I've seen structures bigger than that down in the Slowness."Not hovering in a planetary gravity well, you haven't.

Pham Nuwen seemed to mellow as the evening progressed. At least his comments became more perceptive, less edged. He wanted to see how real traders lived in the Beyond, and Ravna showed him the bourses and the traders' Local.

They ended up in The Wandering Company just after Docks midnight. This was not Organization territory, but it was one of Ravna's favorite places, a private dive that attracted traders from the Top to the Bottom. She wondered how the decor would appeal to Pham Nuwen. 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.

In some ways it might have been a port bar at Sjandra Kei. Yet ... this was Relay. It attracted High Beyonders who would never come to backwaters like Sjandra Kei. Most of the High Ones didn't look very strange; civilizations at the Top were most often just colonies from below. But the headbands she saw here were not jewelry. Mind-computer links aren't efficient in the Middle Beyond, but most of the High Beyonders would not give them up. Ravna started toward a group of banded tripods and their machines. Let Pham Nuwen talk with creatures who teetered on the edge of transsapience.

Surprisingly, he touched her arm, drawing her back. "Let's walk around a little more." He was looking all around the hall, as if searching for a familiar face. "Let's find some other humans first."

When holes showed in Pham Nuwen's cram-education, they were gapingly wide. Ravna tried to keep her face serious. "Other humans? We're all there is at Relay, Pham."

"But the friends you've been telling me about ... Egravan, Sarale?"