Subject: Blighter Video thread
Key phrases: Hexapodia as the key insight
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs? I wasn't sure from the evocation. If these humans have three pairs of legs, then I think there is an easy explanation for — Hexapodia? Six legs? Three pairs of legs? Probably none of these translations was close to what the bewildered creature of Twirlip had in its mind. Ravna didn't read any more of that posting.
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Hanse [No references prior to the Fall of Relay. No probable source. This is someone being very cautious]
Subject: Blighter Video thread, Khurvark University 1
Distribution:
War Trackers Interest Group, Threat of the Blight
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
Khurvark University thinks the Blight is a fraud because elements of the former regime have survived on Straum. There is another explanation. Suppose the Blight is indeed a Power, and that its claims of effective symbiosis are generally true. That means that the creature being "Helped" is no more than a remotely controlled device, his brain simply a local processor supporting the communication. Would you want to be helped like that? My question isn't completely rhetorical; the readership is wide enough that there may be some of you who would answer "yes". However, the vast majority of naturally evolved, sentient beings would be revolted by the notion. Surely the Blight knows this. My guess is that the Blight is not a fraud — but that the notion of surviving culture in Straumli Realm is. Subtly, the Blight wanted to convey the impression that only some are directly enslaved, that cultures as a whole will survive. Combine that with Blight's claim that not all races can be teleoperated. We're left with the subtext that immense riches are available to races that associate themselves with this Power, yet the biological and intellectual imperatives of these races will still be satisfied.
So, the question remains. Just how complete is the Blight's control over conquered races? I don't know. There may not be any self-aware minds left in the Blight's Beyond, only billions of teleoperated devices. One thing is clear: The Blight needs something from us that it cannot yet take.
And so it went. Tens of thousands of messages, hundreds of points of view. It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing. Ravna talked with Blueshell and Greenstalk about it every day, trying to put it together, trying to decide which interpretation to believe.
The Riders knew humans well, but even they weren't sure of the deadness in Ovn Nilsndot's face. And Greenstalk knew humans well enough to see that there was no answer that would comfort Ravna. She rolled back and forth in front of the News window, finally reached a frond out to touch the human. "Perhaps Sir Pham can say, once he is well."
Blueshell was bustling, clinical. "If you're right, that means that somehow the Blight doesn't care what humans and those close to humans know. In a way that makes sense, but…" His voder buzzed absentmindedly for a moment. "I mistrust this message. Four hundred seconds of broad-band, so rich that it gives full-sense imagery for many different races. That's an enormous amount of information, and no compression whatsoever… Maybe it's sweetened bait, forwarded by us poor Beyonders back to our every nest." That suspicion had been in the News too. But there were no obvious patterns in the message, and nothing that talked to network automation. Such subtle poison might work at the Top of the Beyond, but not down here. And that left a simpler explanation, one that would make perfect sense even on Nyjora or Old Earth: the video masked a message to agents already in place.
— =*=
Vendacious was well-known to the people of Woodcarvers — but for mostly the wrong reasons. He was about a century old, the fusion offspring of Woodcarver on two of his strategists. In his early decades, Vendacious had managed the city's wood mills. Along the way he devised some clever improvements on the waterwheel. Vendacious had had his own romantic entanglements — mostly with politicians and speech-makers. More and more, his replacement members inclined him toward public life. For the last thirty years he had been one of the strongest voices on Woodcarvers Council; for the last ten, Lord Chamberlain. In both roles, he had stood for the guilds and for fair trade. There were rumors that if Woodcarver should ever abdicate or wholly die, Vendacious would be the next Lord of Council. Many thought that might be the best that could be made of such a disaster -though Vendacious's pompous speeches were already the bane of the Council.
