Humans and Packs fit, and Old Woodcarver was clever enough to take advantage of it. Ravna liked the Queen, and liked Pilgrim even more, but in the end the Packs would be the great beneficiaries. Woodcarver clearly understood the disabilities of her pack race. Tinish records went back at least ten thousand years. For all their recorded history they had been trapped in cultures not much less advanced than now. A race of sharp intelligence, yet they had a single overwhelming disadvantage: they could not cooperate at close range without losing that intelligence. Their civilizations were made of isolated minds, forced introverts who could never progress beyond certain limits. The eagerness of Pilgrim and Scrupilo and the others for human contact was evidence of this. In the long run, we can move the Tines out of this cul de sac.

Amdi and Jefri were giggling about something, the Pack sending runners out almost to the limit of consciousness. These last weeks, Ravna had come to learn that pell-mell activity was the norm for Amdi, that his initial slowness had been part of his hurt over Steel. How ... perverse (or how wonderful?) ... that a monster like Steel could be the object of such love.

Jefri shouted, "You watch in all directions, let me know where to look." Silence. Then Jefri's voice again: "There!"

"What are you doing?" Johanna asked with sisterly belligerence.

"Watching for meteors," one of the two said. "Yes, I watch in all directions and jab Jefri-there!-where to look when one comes by."

Ravna didn't see anything, but the boy had twisted around abruptly at his friend's signal.

"Neat, neat," came Jefri's voice. "That was about forty kilometers up, speed-" the two's voice murmurred unintelligibly for a second. Even with the pack's wide vision, how could they know how high it was?

Ravna sat back in the hollow formed by the hummocky moss. It was a good parka the locals had made for her; she barely felt the chill in the ground. Overhead, the stars. Time to think, get some peace before all the things that would begin tomorrow. Den Mother to one hundred and fifty kids ... and I thought I was a librarian.

Back home she had loved the night sky; at one glance she could see the other stars of Sjandra Kei, sometimes the other worlds. The places of her home had been in her sky. For a moment the evening chill seemed part of a winter that would never go away. Lynne and her folks and Sjandra Kei. Her whole life till three years ago. It was all gone now. Don't think on it. Somewhere out there was what was left of Aniara fleet, and what was left of her people. Kjet Svensndot. Tirolle and Glimfrelle. She had only known them for a few hours, but they were of Sjandra Kei-and they had saved more than they would ever know. They would still live. SjK Commercial Security had some ramscoops in its fleet. They could find a world, not here, but nearer the battle site.

Ravna tilted her head back, wondering at the sky. Where? Maybe not even above the horizon now. From here the galactic disk was a glow that climbed across the sky almost at right angles to the ecliptic. There was no sense of its true shape or their exact position in it; the greater picture was lost to nearby splendors, the bright knots of open clusters, frozen jewels against the fainter light. But down near the southern horizon, far from the galactic way, there were two splotchy clouds of light. The Magellanics! Suddenly the geometry clicked, and the universe above was not completely unknown. Aniara fleet would be- "I-I wonder if we can see Straumli Realm from here," said Johanna. For more than a year now she had had to play the adult. Come tomorrow, that role would be forever. But her voice just now was wistful, childlike.

Ravna opened her mouth, about to say how unlikely that must be.

"Maybe we can, maybe we can." It was Amdi. The pack had pulled itself together, snuggled companionably among the humans. The warmth was welcome. "See, I've been reading Dataset about where things are, and trying to figure how it matches what we see." A pair of noses were silhouetted against the sky for instant, like a human waving his hands exhuberantly at the heavens. "The brightest things we see are just kind of local dazzle. They aren't good guide posts." He pointed at a couple of open clusters, claimed they matched stuff he'd found in the Dataset. Amdi had also noticed the Magellanic galaxies, and figured out far more than Ravna. "So anyway, Straumli Realm was"-was! you got it kid-"in the High Beyond, but near the galactic disk. So, see that big square of stars?" Noses jabbed. "We call that the Great Square. Anyway, just left of the upper corner and go six thousand light-years, and you'd be at Straumli Realm."

Jefri came to his knees and stared silently for a second. "But so far away, is there anything to see?"

"Not the Straumli stars, but just forty light-years from Straum there's a blue-white giant-"

"Yeah," whispered Johanna. "Storlys. It was so bright you could see shadows at night."

"Well that's the fourth brightest star up from the corner; see, they almost make a straight line. I can see it, so I know you can."

Johanna and Jefri were silent for a long time, just staring up at that patch of sky. Ravna's lips compressed in anger. These were good kids; they had been through hell. And their parents had fought to prevent that hell; they had escaped the Blight with the means of its destruction. But ... how many million races had lived in the Beyond, had probed the Transcend and made bargains with devils? How many more had destroyed themselves There? Ah, but that had not been enough for Straumli Realm. They had gone into the Transcend and wakened Something that could take over a galaxy.

"Do you think anybody's left there?" said Jefri. "Do you think we're all that's left?"

His sister put an arm around him. "Maybe, maybe not Straumli Realm. But the rest of the universe-look, it's still there." Weak laughter. "Daddy and Mom, Ravna and Pham. They stopped the Blight." She waved a hand against the sky. "They saved most all of it."

"Yes," said Ravna. "We're saved and safe, Jefri. To begin again." And as far as it went, that comfort was probably true. The ship's zone probes were still working. Of course, a single measure point is of no use for precise zonography, but she could tell that they were deep in the new volume of the Slowness, the volume created by Pham's Revenge. And-much more significant-the OOB detected no variation in zonal intensity. Gone was the continuous trembling of the months before. This new status had the feeling of mountain roots, to be moved only by the passage of the ages.

Fifty degrees along the galactic river was another unremarkable space of sky. She didn't point it out to the kids, but what was of interest there was much nearer, just under thirty light-years out: the Blighter Fleet. Flies trapped in amber. At normal jump rates for the Low Beyond, they had been just hours away when Pham created the Great Surge. And now ...? If they had been bottom luggers, ships with ramscoops, they could close the gap in less than fifty years. But Aniara Fleet had made their sacrifice; they had followed Pham's godshattered advice. And though they didn't know it, they had broken the Blight. There wasn't a single Slow Zone capable vessel in the approaching fleet. Perhaps they had some in-system capability-a few thousand klicks per second. But no more, not Down Here, where new construction was not a matter of waving a magic wand. The Blight's extermination force would sweep past Tines World in ... a few thousand years. Time enough.

Ravna leaned back against one of Amdi's shoulders. He nestled comfortably around her neck. The puppies had grown these last two months; apparently Steel had kept them on some sort of stunting drugs. Her gaze lost itself in the dark and glow: far upon far that were all the Zones above her. And where are the boundaries now? How awesome was Pham's Revenge. Maybe she should call it Old One's Revenge. No, it was far more even than that. "Old One" was just a recent victim of the Blight. Even Old One was no more than midwife to this revenge. The first cause must be as old as the original Blight and more powerful than the Powers.

But whatever caused it, the Surge had done more than revenge. Ravna had studied the ship's measurement of zone intensity. It could only be an estimate, but she knew they were trapped between one thousand and thirty thousand light-years deep in the new Slowness. Powers only knew how far the Surge had pushed the Slowness... And maybe even some of the Powers were destroyed by it. This was like some vision of planetary armegeddon-the type of thing that primitive civilizations nightmared about-but blown up to a galactic scale. A huge hunk of the Milky Way galaxy had been gobbled up by the Slowness, all in a single afternoon. Not just the Blighter Fleet were flies trapped in amber. Why, the whole vault of heaven-excepting the Magellanics faint and far away-might now be a tomb of Slowness. Many must still be alive out there, but how many millions of starships had been trapped between the stars? How many automated systems had failed, killing the civilizations that depended on them? Heaven was truly silent now. In some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.

And what of the Blight-not the fleet that chased the OOB, but the Blight itself? That was a creature of the Top and the Transcend. At a very far remove, it covered much of the sky they could see this night. Could Pham's revenge have really toppled it? If there was a point to all the sacrifice, then surely so. A surge so great that it pushed the Slowness up thousands of light-years, through the Low and Mid Beyond, past the great civilizations at the Top ... and into the Transcend. No wonder it was so eager to stop us. A Power immersed in the Slowness would be a Power no more, would likely be a living thing no more. If, if, if. If Pham's Surge could climb so high.

And that is something I will never know.

Crypto: 0 Syntax: 43 As received by: Language path: Optima From: Society for Rational Investigation Subject: Ping Key phrases: Help me!

Summary: Has there been a network partition, or what?

Distribution:

Threat of the Blight

Society for Rational Network Management

War Trackers Interest Group

Date: 0.412 Msec since loss of contacts Text of message: I have still not recovered contact with any network site known to be spinward of me. Apparently, I am right at the edge of a catastrophe.

If you receive this ping, please respond! Am I in danger?

For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long way around the galaxy. At least that would give us an idea how big the loss is. Nothing has come back as yet-not surprising, I guess, considering the great number of hops and the expense.

In the meantime, I am sending out pings such as this. I am expending enormous resources to do this, let me tell you-but it is that important. I've beamed direct at all the hub sites that are in range to the spinward of me. No replies.

More ominous: I have tried to transmit "over the top", that is by using known sites in the Transcend that are above the catastrophe. Most such would not normally respond, Powers being what they are. But I received no replies. A silence like the Depths is there. It appears that a portion of the Transcend itself has been engulfed.

Again: If you receive this message, please respond!

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY.

by Vernor Vinge.

To Poul Anderson, In learning to write science fiction, I have had many great models, but Poul Anderson's work has meant more to me than any other. Beyond that, Poul has provided me and the world with an enormous treasure of wonderful, entertaining stories-and he continues to do so.

On a personal note, I will always be grateful to Poul and Karen Anderson for the hospitality that they showed a certain young science fiction writer back in the 1960s.

-V.V.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I am grateful for the advice and help of: Robert Cademy, John Carroll, Howard L. Davidson, Bob Fleming, Leonard Foner, Michael Gannis, Jay R. Hill, Eric Hughes, Sharon Jarvis, Yoji Kondo, Cherie Kushner, Tim May, Keith Mayers, Mary Q. Smith, and Joan D. Vinge.

I am very grateful to James Frenkel for the wonderful job of editing he has done with this book and for his timely insight on problems with the earlier drafts.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

This novel takes place thousands of years from now. The connection with our languages and writing systems is tenuous. But, for what it's worth, the initial sound in "Qeng Ho" is the same as the initial sound in the English word "checker." (Trixia Bonsol would understand the problem!).

PROLOGUE.

The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight centuries. It had always been a secret search, unacknowledged even among some of the participants. In the early years, it had simply been encrypted queries hidden in radio broadcasts. Decades and centuries passed. There were clues, interviews with The Man's fellow-travelers, pointers in a half-dozen contradictory directions: The Man was alone now and heading still farther away; The Man had died before the search ever began; The Man had a war fleet and was coming back upon them.

With time, there was some consistency to the most credible stories. The evidence was solid enough that certain ships changed schedules and burned decades of time to look for more clues. Fortunes were lost because of the detours and delays, but the losses were to a few of the largest trading Families, and went unacknowledged. They were rich enough, and this search was important enough, that it scarcely mattered. For the search had narrowed: The Man was traveling alone, a vague blur of multiple identities, a chain of one-shot jobs on minor trading vessels, but always moving back and back into this end of Human Space. The hunt narrowed from a hundred light-years, to fifty, to twenty-and a half-dozen star systems.

And finally, the manhunt came down to a single world at the coreward end of Human Space. Now Sammy could justify a fleet specially for the end of the hunt. The crew and even most of the owners would not know the mission's true purpose, but he had a good chance of finally ending the search.

Sammy himself went groundside on Triland. For once, it made sense for a Fleet Captain to do the detail work: Sammy was the only one in the fleet who had actually met The Man in person. And given the present popularity of his fleet here, he could cut through whatever bureaucratic nonsense might come up. Those were good reasons...but Sammy would be down here in any case. I have waited so long, and in a little while we'll have him.

"Why should I help you find anyone! I'm not your mother!" The little man had backed into his inner office space. Behind him, a door was cracked five centimeters wide. Sammy caught a glimpse of a child peeking out fearfully at them. The little man shut the door firmly. He glared at the Forestry constables who had preceded Sammy into the building. "I'll tell you one more time: My place of business is the net. If you didn't find what you want there, then it's not available from me."

" 'Scuse me." Sammy tapped the nearest constable on the shoulder. " 'Scuse me." He slipped through the ranks of his protectors.

The proprietor could see that someone tall was coming through. He reached toward his desk. Lordy. If he trashed the databases he had distributed across the net, they'd get nothing out of him.

But the fellow's gesture froze. He stared in shock at Sammy's face. "Admiral?"

"Um, 'Fleet Captain,' if you please."

"Yes, yes! We've been watching you on the news every day now. Please! Sit down. You're the source of the inquiry?"

The change in manner was like a flower opening to the sunlight. Apparently the Qeng Ho was just as popular with the city folk as it was with the Forestry Department. In a matter of seconds, the proprietor-the "private investigator," as he called himself-had pulled up records and started search programs. "...Hmm. You don't have a name, or a good physical description, just a probable arrival date. Okay, now Forestry claims your fellow must have become someone named 'Bidwel Ducanh.'" His gaze slid sideways to the silent constables, and he smiled. "They're very good at reaching nonsense conclusions from insufficient information. In this case..." He did something with his search programs. "Bidwel Ducanh. Yeah, now that I search for it, I remember hearing about that fellow. Sixty or a hundred years ago he made some kind of a name for himself." A figure that had come from nowhere, with a moderate amount of money and an uncanny flare for self-advertisement. In a period of thirty years, he had gathered the support of several major corporations and even the favor of the Forestry Department. "Ducanh claimed to be a city-person, but he was no freedom fighter. He wanted to spend money on some crazy, long-term scheme. What was it? He wanted to..." The private investigator looked up from his reading to stare a moment at Sammy. "He wanted to finance an expedition to the OnOff star!"

Sammy just nodded.

"Damn! If he had been successful, Triland would have an expedition partway there right now." The investigator was silent for a moment, seeming to contemplate the lost opportunity. He looked back at his records. "And you know, he almost succeeded. A world like ours would have to bankrupt itself to go interstellar. But sixty years ago, a single Qeng Ho starship visited Triland. Course, they didn't want to break their schedule, but some of Ducanh's supporters were hoping they'd help out. Ducanh wouldn't have anything to do with the idea, wouldn't even talk to the Qeng Ho. After that, Bidwel Ducanh pretty much lost his credibility... He faded from sight."

All this was in Triland's Forestry Department records. Sammy said, "Yes. We're interested in where this individual .is now." There had been no interstellar vessel in Triland's solar system for sixty years. He is here!

"Ah, so you figure he may have some extra information, something that would be useful even after what's happened the last three years?"

Sammy resisted an impulse to violence. A little more patience now, what more could it cost after the centuries of waiting? "Yes," he said, benignly judicious, "it would be good to cover all the angles, don't you think?"

"Right. You've come to the right place. I know city things that the Forestry people never bother to track. I really want to help." He was watching some kind of scanning analysis, so this was not completely wasted time. "These alien radio messages are going to change our world, and I want my children to-"

The investigator frowned. "Huh! You just missed this Bidwel character, Fleet Captain. See, he's been dead for ten years."

Sammy didn't say anything, but his mild manner must have slipped; the little man flinched when he looked up at him. "I-I'm sorry, sir. Perhaps he left some effects, a will."

It can't be. Not when I'm so close. But it was a possibility that Sammy had always known. It was the commonplace in a universe of tiny lifetimes and interstellar distances. "I suppose we are interested in any data the man left behind." The words came out dully. At least we have closure-that would be the concluding line from some smarmy intelligence analyst.

The investigator tapped and muttered at his devices. The Forestry Department had reluctantly identified him as one of the best of the city class, so well distributed that they could not simply confiscate his equipment to take him over. He was genuinely trying to be helpful... "There may be a will, Fleet Captain, but it's not on the Grandville net."

"Some other city, then?" The fact that the Forestry Department had partitioned the urban networks was a very bad sign for Triland's future.

"...Not exactly. See, Ducanh died at one of Saint Xupere's Pauper Cemeteria, the one in Lowcinder. It looks like the monks have held on to his effects. I'm sure they would give them up in return for a decent-sized donation." His eyes returned to the constables and his expression hardened. Maybe he recognized the oldest one, the Commissioner of Urban Security. No doubt they could shake down the monks with no need for any contribution.

Sammy rose and thanked the private investigator; his words sounded wooden even to himself. As he walked back toward the door and his escort, the investigator came quickly around his desk and followed him. Sammy realized with abrupt embarrassment that the fellow hadn't been paid. He turned back, feeling a sudden liking for the guy. He admired someone who would demand his pay in the face of unfriendly cops. "Here," Sammy started to say, "this is what I can-"

But the fellow held up his hands. "No, not necessary. But there is a favor I would like from you. See, I have a big family, the brightest kids you've ever seen. This joint expedition isn't going to leave Triland for another five or ten years, right? Can you make sure that my kids, even one of them-?"

Sammy cocked his head. Favors connected with mission success came very dear. "I'm sorry, sir," he said as gently as he could. "Your children will have to compete with everyone else. Have them study hard in college. Have them target the specialties that are announced. That will give them the best chance."

"Yes, Fleet Captain! That is exactly the favor that I am asking. Would you see to it-" He swallowed and looked fiercely at Sammy, ignoring the others. "-would you see to it that they are allowed to undertake college studies?"

"Certainly." A little grease on academic entrance requirements didn't bother Sammy at all. Then he realized what the other was really saying. "Sir, I'll make sure of it."

"Thank you. Thank you!" He touched his business card into Sammy's hand. "There's my name and stats. I'll keep it up-to-date. Please remember."

"Yes, uh, Mr. Bonsol, I'll remember." It was a classic Qeng Ho deal.

The city dropped away beneath the Forestry Department flyer. Grandville had only about half a million inhabitants, but they were crammed into a snarled slum, the air above them shimmering with summer heat. The First Settlers' forest lands spread away for thousands of kilometers around it, virgin terraform wilderness.

They boosted high into clean indigo air, arcing southward. Sammy ignored the Triland "Urban Security" boss sitting right beside him; just now he had neither the need nor the desire to be diplomatic. He punched a connection to his Deputy Fleet Captain. Kira Lisolet's autoreport streamed across his vision. Sum Dotran had agreed to the schedule change: all the fleet would be going to the OnOff star.

"Sammy!" Kira's voice cut across the automatic report. "How did it go?" Kira Lisolet was the only other person in the fleet who knew the true purpose of this mission, the manhunt.

"I-" We lost him, Kira. But Sammy couldn't say the words. "See for yourself, Kira. The last two thousand seconds of my pov. I'm headed back to Lowcinder now...one last loose end to tie down."