"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.
— =*=
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.
