"Yes. I — He — was sympathetic, the way you might be with animals that are confronting some new predator. He never considered that the Perversion might be a threat to him, not until — "
"Right. Not until he was under attack. That was a complete surprise to the Powers; suddenly the Perversion was more than a curious problem for underminds. Then Old One really did try to help. He jammed plans and automation down into you. He jammed so much, you nearly died, so much you can't make sense of it. I've read about things like that in Applied Theology — " as much legend as fact. "Godshatter, it's called."
"Godshatter?" He seemed to play with the word, wondering. "What a strange name. I remember His panic. But if He was doing what you say, why didn't He just tell me? And if I'm filled with good advice, how come all I see inside is…" his gaze became a little like days past, "darkness… dark statues with sharp edges, crowding."
Again a long silence. But now she could almost feel Pham thinking. His arms twitched tight and an occasional shudder swept his body. "Yes… yes. Lots of things fit. Most of it I still don't understand, never will. Old One discovered something right there at the end." His arms tightened again, and he buried his face against her neck. "It was a very… personal… sort of murder the Perversion committed on Him. Even dying, Old One learned." More silence. "The Perversion is something very old, Ravna. Probably billions of years. A threat Old One could only theorize before it actually killed Him. But…"
One minute. Two. Yet Pham did not continue. "Don't worry, Pham. Give it time."
"Yeah." He backed off far enough to look her square in the face. "But I know this much now: Old One did this for a reason. We aren't on a fool's chase. There's something on the Bottom, in that Straumer ship, that Old One thought could make a difference."
He ran his hand lightly across her face, and his smile was sad where there should have been joy. "But don't you see, Ravna? If you're right, today may be the most human I'll ever be. I'm full of Old One's download, this godshatter. Most of it I'll never consciously understand, but if things work properly, it will eventually come exploding out. His remote device; His robot at the Bottom of the Beyond."
No! But she made herself shrug. "Maybe. But you're human, and we're working for the same things… and I'm not letting you go."
Ravna had known that "jumpstarting" technology must be a topic in the ship's library. It turned out the subject was a major academic specialty. Besides ten thousand case studies, there were customizing programs and lots of very dull-looking theory. Though the "rediscovery problem" was trivial in the Beyond, down in the Slow Zone almost every conceivable combination of events had happened. Civilizations in the Slowness could not last more than a few thousand years. Their collapse was sometimes a short eclipse, a few decades spent recovering from war or atmosphere-bashing. Others drove themselves back to medievalism. And of course, most races eventually exterminated themselves, at least within their single solar system. Those that didn't exterminate themselves (and even a few of those that did) eventually struggled back to their original heights.
The study of these variations was called the Applied History of Technology. Unfortunately for both academicians and the civilizations in the Slow Zone, true applications were a bit rare: The events of the case studies were centuries old before news of them reached the Beyond, and few researchers were willing to do field work in the Slow Zone, where finding and conducting a single experiment could cost them much of their lives. In any case, it was a nice hobby for millions of university departments. One of the favorite games was to devise minimal paths from a given level of technology back to the highest level that could be supported in the Slowness. The details depended on many things, including the initial level of primitiveness, the amount of residual scientific awareness (or tolerance), and the physical nature of the race. The historians' theories were captured in programs whose inputs were facts about the civilization's plight and the desired results, and whose outputs were the steps that would most quickly produce those results.
Two days later, the four of them were back on the OOB's bridge. And this time we're all talking. "So we must decide what inventions to shoot for, something that will defend the Hidden Island Kingdom — "
"— and something 'Mister Steel' can make in less than one hundred days," said Blueshell. He had spent most of the last two days fiddling with the development programs in OOB's library.
"I still say guns and radios," said Pham.
