Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

Pham thought back over the things they had offered the RIPers. Lord, not the low zone ultrawave gear. "Okay, I'll bite. What do we have to give'em?"

"A set of flamed trellises! Hah hah."

"Huh?" Pham remembered the name from the list of odds and ends the Skroderiders had scrounged up. "What's a 'flamed trellis'?"

Blueshell poked a frond into his satchel and extended something stubby and black to Pham: an irregular solid, about forty centimeters by fifteen, smooth to the touch. For all its size, it didn't mass more than a couple of grams. An artfully smoothed… cinder. Pham's curiosity triumphed over greater concerns: "But what's it good for?"

Blueshell dithered. After a moment, Greenstalk said a little shyly, "There are theories. It's pure carbon, a fractal polymer. We know it's very common in Transcendent cargoes. We think it's used as packing material for some kinds of sentient property."

"Or perhaps the excrement of such property," Blueshell buzz-muttered. "Ah, but that's not important. What is, is that occasional races in the Middle Beyond prize them. And why that? Again, we don't know. Saint Rihndell's folk are certainly not the final user. The Tusk-legs are far too sensible to be ordinary trellis customers. So. We have three hundred of these wonderful things… more than enough to overcome Saint Rihndell's fears of the Aprahanti."

While Pham had been away with Ravna, Saint Rihndell had come up with a plan. Applying the regrowth agent would be too obvious in the same harbor with the Aprahanti ships. Besides, the chief Butterfly had demanded the OOB move out. Saint Rihndell had a small harbor about sixteen million klicks around the RIP system. The move was even plausible, for it happened that there was a Skroderider terrane in the Harmonious Repose system — and currently it was just a few hundred kilometers from Rihndell's second harbor. They would rendezvous with the tusk-legs, exchanging repairs for two hundred seventeen flamed trellises. And if the trellises were perfectly matched, Rihndell promised to throw in an agrav refit. After the Fall of Relay, that would be very welcome… Hunh. Ol' Blueshell just never stopped wheeling and dealing.

The OOB slipped free of its moorings and carefully drifted up from the ring plane. Tiptoe-ing out. Pham kept a close watch on the EM and ultrawave windows. But there were no target-locking emanations from the Aprahanti vessels, nothing more than casual radar contact. No one followed. Little OOB and its "potted plants" were beneath the notice of the great warriors.

One thousand meters above the ring plane. Three. The Skroderiders' chatter — both with Pham and between themselves — dwindled to naught. Their stalks and fronds angled so the sensing surfaces looked out in all directions. The sun and its power cloud was a blaze of light on one side of the deck. They were above the rings, but still so close… It was like standing at sunset on a beach of colored sands… that stretched to an infinite horizon. The Skroderiders stared into it, their fronds gently swaying.

Twenty kilometers above the rings. One thousand. They lit the OOB's main torch and accelerated across the system. The Skroderiders came slowly out of their trance. Once they arrived at the second harbor, the regrowth would take about five hours — assuming Rihndell's agent had not deteriorated; the Saint claimed it was recently imported from the Top, and undiluted.

"Okay, so when do we deliver the trellises?"

"On completion of the repairs. We can't depart until Saint Rihndell -or his customers — are satisfied that all the pieces are genuine."

Pham drummed his fingers on the comm console. This operation brought back a lot of memories, some of them hair-raising. "So they get the goods while we're still in the middle of RIP. I don't like it."

"See here, Sir Pham. Your experience with star trading was in the Slow Zone, where exchanges were separated by decades or centuries of travel time. I admire you for that, more than I can say — but it gives you a twisted view of things. Up here in the Beyond, the notion of return business is important. We know very little of Saint Rihndell's inner motivation, but we do know his repair business has existed for at least forty years. Sharp dealing we can expect from him, but if he robbed or murdered very many, trader groups would know, and his little business would starve."

"Hmf." No point in arguing it right now, but Pham guessed that this situation was special. Rihndell — and the RIPers in general — had Death to Vermin sitting on their doorstep, and stories of major chaos coming from the direction of Sjandra Kei. With that background they might just lose their courage once they had the trellises. Some precautions were in order. He drifted off to the ship's machine shop.

Ravna came to the cargo deck as Blueshell and Greenstalk were preparing the trellises for delivery. She moved hesitantly, pushing awkwardly from point to point. There were dark rings, almost bruises, beneath her eyes. She returned Pham's hug almost tentatively, but didn't let go. "I want to help. Is there anything I can do to help?"

The Skroderiders left their trellises and rolled over. Blueshell ran a frond gently across Ravna's arm, "Nothing for you to do now, my lady Ravna. We have everything well, ah, in hand. We'll be back in less than an hour, and then we can be rid of here."

But they let her check their cameras and the cargo strap-downs. Pham drifted close by her as she inspected the trellises. The twisted carbon blocks looked stranger than the one alone had. Properly stacked, they fit perfectly. More than a meter across, the stack looked like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle carved from coal. Counting a separate bag of loose spares, they totaled less than half a kilogram. Huh. Damn things should be flammable as hell. Pham resolved to play with the remaining hundred odd trellises after they were safely back in deep space.

Then the Skroderiders were through the cargo lock with their delivery, and they could only follow along on their cameras.

This secondary harbor was not really part of the tusk-leg race's terrane. The inside of the arc was far different from what they had seen on the Skroderiders' first trip. There were no exterior views. Cramped passages wound between irregular walls pocked with dark holes. Insects flew everywhere, often covering parts of the camera balls. To Pham, the place looked filthy. There was no evidence of the terrane's owners — unless they were the pallid worms that sometimes stuck a featureless head(?) up from a burrow hole. Over his voice link, Blueshell opined that these were very ancient tenants of the RIP system. After a million years, and a hundred transcendent emigrations, the residue might still be sentient, but stranger than anything evolved in the Slow Zone. Such a people would be protected from physical extinction by ancient automation, but they would also be inward turning, totally cautious, absorbed in concerns that were inane by any outside standard. It was the type that most often lusted after trellis work.

Pham tried to keep an eye on everything. The Riders had to travel almost four kilometers from the harbor lock to reach the place where the trellises would be "validated". Pham counted two exterior locks along the way, and nothing that looked especially threatening — but then how would he know what "threatening" looked like here? He had the OOB mount an exterior watch. A large shepherd satellite floated on the outer side of the ring, but there were no other ships in this harbor. The EM and ultra-environment seemed placid, and what could be seen on the local net did not make the ship's defenses suspicious.

Pham looked up from the reports. Ravna had drifted across the deck to the outside view. The repair work was visible, though not spectacular. A pale greenish aura hung around the damaged spines. It was scarcely brighter than the glow you often see on ship hulls in low planetary orbit. She turned and said softly, "Is it really getting fixed?"