Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc. The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers, they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths were occupied.

Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell's business specs. "Hmm. Hm. Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy." He angled some fronds back at the ships in the exterior view.

Pham: "Maybe he's running a junkyard."

Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with "Saint Rihndell".

"Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would remember the type even if I'd never ridden a Skrode. But our business here is not like anything we've done before."

Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic stuff that protected what it covered.

This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly, there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it came to renting bandwidth — or maybe it was simply cautious.

Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was encrypted.

"Yes."

The Skroderiders passed through OOB's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc habitat.

From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view, but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like food in a slow tidal surge.

The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment, one such drifted out from the wall near the OOB's lock. It buzzed something that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk, "The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs — evolved from flippers or jaws or whatever — were all very good for movement on land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.

The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going? What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.

Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller… helper creatures those are… allies of big new customer…" Their guide's limited speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important questions: What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I persuade you to part with it? Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and ability.

It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore articulated pressure suits — the force-field suits of the High Beyond would last only a few weeks down here.

They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration… but she doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.

Greenstalk had visited eight ring system civilizations in her life. They were a common consequence of accidents and wars (and occasionally, of deliberate habitat design). According to OOB's library, Harmonious Repose had been a normal planetary system up till ten million years ago. Then there'd been a real estate dispute: A young race from Below had thought to colonize and exterminate the moribund inhabitants. The attack had been a miscalculation, for the moribund could still kill and the system was reduced to rubble. Perhaps the young race survived. But after ten million years, if there were any of those young killers left they would now be the most frail of the systems' elder races. Perhaps a thousand new races had passed through in that time, and almost every one had done something to tailor the rings and the gas cloud left from the debacle. What was left was not a ruin at all, but old… old. The ship's library claimed that no race had transcended from Harmonious Repose in a thousand years. That fact was more important than all the others. The current civilizations were in their twilight, refining mediocrity. More than anything else, the system had the feel of an old and beautiful tide pool, groomed and tended, shielded from the exciting waves that might upset its bansai plumes. Most likely the tusk-legs were the liveliest species about, perhaps the only one interested in trade with the outside.

Their car slowed and spiraled into a small tower.

"By the Fleet, what I wouldn't give to be out there with them!" Pham Nuwen waved at the views coming in from the skrode cameras. Ever since the Riders left, he'd been at the windows, alternately gaping wide-eyed at the ringscape and bouncing abstractedly between the command deck's floor and ceiling. Ravna had never seen him so absorbed, so intense. However fraudulent his memories of trading days, he truly thought he could make a difference. And he may be right.