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-=*=-



CHAPTER 7
!CHK how you phrased a similar discussion in the "Science Fair" and
! elsewhere -- don't think it's in "Science Fair" February 9, 1991
!CHKd "place-name"
^ V CHK INCON 1 ly/day at the bottom
!V CHK INCON 400 b/s v 400 bps v some other number
!V June 11, 1991 -- deleted such references

"Relay" is a common place-name. It has meaning in almost any environment. Like Newtown and Newhome, it occurs over and over when people move or colonize or participate in a communication net. You could travel a billion light-years or a billion years and still find such names among folk of natural intelligence.
But in the current era there was one instance of "Relay" known above all others. That instance appeared in the routing list of two percent of all traffic across the Known Net. Twenty thousand light-years off the galactic plane, Relay had an unobstructed line of sight on thirty percent of the Beyond, including many star systems right at the bottom, where starships can make only one light-year per day. A few metal-bearing solar systems were equally well-placed, and there was competition. But where other civilizations lost interest, or colonized into the Transcend, or died in apocalypse, Vrinimi Organization lasted. After fifty thousand years, there were several races of the original Org in its membership. None of those were still leaders -- yet the original viewpoint and policies remained. Position and durability: Relay was now the main intermediate to the Magellanics, and one of the few sites with any sort of link to the Beyond in Sculptor. !V June 11, 1991 I don't think this is contradictory as long as you
!V make a distinction between culture and race.
!V INCON relate this 50Ky (c06, too) with the other time sizes, eg,
!V Dirokemes
!V in c33, you say Dirokimes have been in Beyond 1e6 years, and
!V may last another 0.5e6
!V In c26 You say planets destroyed at RIP 10e6 years ago and say
!V that that amount of time is rather long for the longevity of a race
!V Discussion of these issues <longev> is consistent in c08
!V now February 9, 1991
!FRAG BKG The Relay system was the channel passing information between
! forty million worlds. Note that this would be in (apparent)
! conflict with the 100e6 figure in c06 June 11, 1991
!JLC Objects to the term "weave" in connection with agrav
!jrf I like "weave" use
!V CHK geometry: Magellanics, Sculptor, Fornax
!V 09Feb91
!V From Allen p268, 272-273 and Shu p266, I conclude that are all
!V on the same side of the galactic disk (150, 330, 600 Kly
!V respectively) (IrI,IrI; E; E). I think there would be a good
!V line of sight on all three if Relay is high above the galactic
!V plane and 180 degrees of galactic center longitude from Sol.

At Sjandra Kei, Relay's reputation had been fabulous. In her two years of 'prenticeship, Ravna had come to realize that the truth exceeded the reputation. Relay was in Middle Beyond; the Organization's only export was the relay function and access to the local archive. Yet they imported the finest biologicals and processing equipment from the High Beyond. The Relay Docks were an extravagance that only the absolutely rich could indulge. They stretched a thousand kilometers: bays, repair holds, transhipment centers, parks, and playgrounds. Even at Sjandra Kei there were habitats far larger. But the Docks were in no orbit. They floated a thousand kilometers above Groundside on the largest agrav frame Ravna had ever seen. At Sjandra Kei the annual income of an academician might pay for a square meter of agrav fabric -- junk that might not last a year. Here there were millions of hectares of the stuff, supporting billions of tonnes. Just replacements for dead fabric required more High Beyond commerce than most star clusters could command. !jrf2 explain "agrav weave"
!QU should make it clearer that this office is a recent
! perk of her transfer to Grondr? V: I think it's clear
!CHKd 0.7469 gee at 1000km (Earth reference)

And now I have my own office here. Working directly for Grondr 'Kalir had its perks. Ravna kicked back in her chair and stared across the central sea. At the Docks' altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above.
She had the surf cranked up this morning -- an easy matter of flexing the agravs of the basin. It made a regular crashing against her beach. Even thirty meters from the water there was a tang of salt in the air. Rows of white tops marched off into the distance. !V June 12, 1991 CHRON CHKd (actually it's 31 or 32 days maybe)

She eyed the figure that was trudging slowly up the beach toward her. Just a few weeks ago she would never have dreamed this situation. Just a few weeks ago she had been out at the archive, absorbed in the upgrade work, happy to be involved with one of the largest databases on the Known Net. Now ... it was almost as if she had come full circle, back to her childhood dreams of adventure. the only problem was, sometimes she felt like one of the bad guys: Pham Nuwen was a living person, not something to be sold. !ID PRB Be nice to mention hot sand, foam in air, etc

She stood and walked out to meet her red-haired visitor. !FRAG The Nyjoran colony had represented a tiny fragment of the original
! diversity, though its descendents were all (that they knew) to
! have made it into the Beyond.
!CHKd sp smoky

He wasn't carrying the sword and handgun of Grondr's fanciful animation. Yet his clothes were the braided fabric of ancient adventure, and he carried himself with lazy confidence. Since her meeting with Grondr, she had looked up some anthropology from Old Earth. The red hair and the eyefolds had been known there, though rarely in the same individual. Certainly his smoky skin would have been remarkable to an inhabitant of Earth. This fellow was, as much as herself, a product of post-terrestrial evolution. !CHKd sp couldn't find "arm.s.length"

He stopped an arm's length away and gave her a lopsided grin. "You look pretty human. Ravna Bergsndot?"
She smiled and nodded up at him. "Mr. Pham Nuwen?"
"Yes indeed. We seem both to be excellent guessers." He swept past her into the shade of the inner office. Cocky fellow.
She followed him, unsure about protocol. You'd think with a fellow human there would be no problems.... !CHKd resuscitation and CHKd date (02Feb91 )
!jrf This is oddly ill at ease here. What went smoothly is unclear.
!jrf Is this a summation of a scene right after he walks in?
!V I think I've fixed this January 24, 1991
!V CHRON CHKd 02Feb91
!V June 12, 1991 3y 'prenticeship; see also c06 CHKd

Actually, the interview went pretty smoothly. It was more than thirty days since Pham Nuwen's resuscitation. Much of that time had been spent in cram language sessions. The fellow must be damned bright; he already spoke Triskweline trade talk with a folksy slickness. He really was rather cute. Ravna had been away from Sjandra Kei for two years, and had another year of her 'prenticeship to go. She'd been doing pretty well. She had many close friends here, Egravan, Sarale. But just chatting with this fellow brought a lot of the loneliness back. In some ways he was more alien than anything at Relay ... and in some ways she wanted to just grab him and kiss his confident grin away. !jrf NOT he wrote under "in some ways" <?>
!V I don't understand
!jrf2 I meant he's weirder because all the aliens are living their
!jrf2 natural life spans whereas he's a fish out of time, etc.
!jrf2 Maybe you should say "In one regard..."
!V June 11, 1991 I still don't see that I should change it
!QU Is this jarring, since I cut away from the Grondr scene before
! Grondr said this?
!ID BKG maybe it's exponentially hard to eavesdrop from the Transcend?
! This could be one explanation why the Helper or Pham's controller don't
! just listen on their own. However, if you do this then it makes
! it implausible that Relay would be in communication with the Beyond in
! Fornax. Possibly, this could explain why only a few sites have such
! comm (but it could not be solely Relay's geometry, in that case)
!REN spell Cheng Ho --> Qeng Ho
!V IMP PRB March 17, 1991 onwak: explain how Pham came to be on "this
!V side of the galaxy" -- June 11, 1991 TUF SEQ
!V June 11, 1991 and in c06, I do say the dredge is
!V "from very far away"

Grondr Vrinimikalir had been telling the truth about Pham Nuwen. The guy was actually enthusiastic about the Org's plans for him! In theory, that meant she could do her job with a clear conscience. In fact.... ^ V AWK (stagey) (also, you'd think the sexual angle would be
^ V more immediately obtrusive, since there aren't other humans around)

"Mr. Nuwen, my job is to orient you to your new world. I know you've been exposed to some intense instruction the last few days, but there are limits to how fast such knowledge can sink in."
The redhead smiled. "Call me Pham. Sure, I feel like an over-stuffed bag. My sleep time is full of little voices. I've learned an awful lot without experiencing anything. Worse, I've been a target for all this 'education'. It's a perfect setup if Vrinimi wants to trick me. That's why I'm learning to use the local library. And that's why I insisted they find someone like you." He saw the surprise on her face. "Ha! You didn't know that. See, talking to a real person gives me a chance to see things that aren't all planned ahead. Also, I've always been a pretty good judge of human nature; I think I can read you pretty well." His grin showed he understood just how irritating he was being.
Ravna looked up at the green petals of the beachtrees. Maybe this boob deserved what he was getting into. "So you have great experience dealing with people?"
"Given the limitations of the Slowness, I've been around, Ravna. I've been around. I know I don't look it, but I'm sixty-seven years old subjective. I thank your Organization for a fine job of thawing me out." He tipped a non-existent hat in her direction. "My last voyage was more than a thousand years objective. I was Programmer-at-Arms on a Qeng Ho longshot --" His eyes abruptly widened, and he said something unintelligible. For a moment he almost looked vulnerable.
Ravna reached a hand toward him. "Memory?"
Pham Nuwen nodded. "Damn. This is something I don't thank you people for." !PRB QU work on making Ravna "plucky"
!hld Communication with the Transcend much easier with local
!hld translator/buffer in the High Beyond. Time base corrections
!hld "philosophy matching" hardware-wetware
!hld
!hld Change "chaotic freezing" to "accidental freezing"
^ ?V IMPER INCON even so:
!V INCON Think I'll try to go with Middle Beyond for Relay. Note that
!V this will change some references late in the book.

Pham Nuwen had been frozen in the aftermath of violent death, not as a planned suspension. It was a near miracle that Vrinimi Org had been able to bring him back at all -- at least with Middle Beyond technology. But memory was the hardest thing. The chemical basis of memory does not survive chaotic freezing well.
The problem was enough to shrink even Pham Nuwen's ego by a size or two. Ravna took pity on him. "It's not likely that anything is completely lost. You just have to find a different angle on some things."
"... Yes. I've been coached about that. Start with other memories; work sideways toward what you can't remember straight on. Well ... it beats being dead." Some of his jauntiness returned, but subdued to a really quite charming level. They talked for long while as the redhead worked around the points he couldn't "remember straight on". !jrf2 "almost reminiscing" is vague
!V PRO write Canberra as Pham's home world

And gradually Ravna came to feel something she had never expected in connection with a Slow Zoner: awe. In one lifetime, Pham Nuwen had accomplished virtually everything that was possible for a being in the Slowness. All her life she had pitied the civilizations trapped down there. They could never know the glory; they might never know the truth. Yet by luck and skill and sheer strength of will, this fellow had leaped barrier after barrier. Had Grondr known the truth when he pictured the redhead with sword and slug gun? For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian. He had been born on a fallen colony world -- Canberra he called it. The place sounded much like medieval Nyjora, though not matriarchal. He'd been the youngest child of a king. He'd grown up with swords and poison and intrigue, living in stone castles by a cold, cold sea. No doubt this littlest prince would have ended up murdered -- or king of all -- if life had continued in the medieval way. But when he was thirteen years old everything changed. A world that had only legends of aircraft and radio was confronted by interstellar traders. In a year of trading, Canberra's feudal politics was turned on its head. ^ ?jrf2 "usual feudal politics" instead of "feudal politics"?
!PRB his colloquial use of language TUF June 11, 1991 (you give some
!V excuse above
!iD For end of n7, Pham Nuwen could make the point that ultimately he
! intends to go back to the Top -- after he's made his legend true
!PRB Literally speaking, sword and slug gun are incompatible QU
!BKG about Qeng Ho follows

"Qeng Ho had invested three ships in the expedition to Canberra. They were pissed, thought we'd be at a higher level of technology. We couldn't resupply them, so two stayed behind, probably turned my poor world inside out. I left with the third -- a crazy hostage deal my father thought he was putting over on them. I was lucky they didn't space me." !V CHKd "light-year" sp
!V (also in c28 c38) ID the flight of the Wild Goose; maybe they had
!V (inaccurate) evidence of the zones IMP for SEQ

Qeng Ho consisted of several hundred ramscoop ships operating in a volume hundreds of light-years across. Their vessels could reach almost a third of the speed of light. They were mostly traders, occasionally rescuers, even more rarely conquerors. When Pham Nuwen last knew them, they had settled thirty worlds and were almost three thousand years old. It was as extravagant a civilization as can ever exist in the Slowness.... And of course, until Pham Nuwen was revived, no one in the Beyond had ever heard of it. Qeng Ho was like a million other doomed civilizations, buried thousands of light-years in the Slowness. Only by luck would they ever penetrate into the Beyond, where faster-than-light travel was possible. !jrf2 "could ever exist" instead of "can ever exist"
!V June 11, 1991 CHKd sp "cabin boy"

But for a thirteen-year-old boy born to swords and chain mail, the Qeng Ho was more change than most living beings ever experience. In a matter of weeks, he went from medieval lordling to starship cabin boy. !IMP Ask Poul about the Qeng Ho motto, its origin and if you may use it.
!V June 11, 1991 Poul wrote back that it was okay to use it.

"At first they didn't know what to do with me. Figured on popping me into cold storage and dumping me at the next stop. What can you make of a kid who thinks there's one world and it's flat, who has spent his whole life learning to whack about with a sword?" He stopped abruptly, as he did every few minutes, when the stream of recollection ran into damaged territory. Then his glance flicked out at Ravna, and his smile was as cocky as ever. "I was one mean animal. I don't think civilized people realize what it's like to grow up with your own aunts and uncles scheming to murder you, and you training to get them first. In civilization I met bigger villains -- guys who'd fry a whole planet and call it 'reconciliation' -- but for sheer up-close treachery, you can't beat my childhood." !jrf2 How do they get this word ("reconciliation") for that act
!jrf2 ("fry a whole planet")?! <cf Earth's Middle East -- V>
!V "coldsleep" one word?

To hear Pham Nuwen tell it, only dumb luck saved the crew from his scheming. In the years that followed, he learned to fit in, learned civilized skills. Properly tamed, he could be an ideal ship master of the Qeng Ho. And for many years he was. The Qeng Ho volume contained a couple of other races, and a number of human-colonized worlds. At 0.3c, Pham spent decades in coldsleep getting from star to star, then a year or two at each port trying to make a profit with products and information that might be lethally out-of-date. The reputation of the Qeng Ho was some protection. "Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever" was the fleet's motto, and they had lasted longer than most of their customers. Even religious fanatics grew a little cautious when they thought about Qeng Ho retribution. But more often it was the skill and deviousness of the shipmaster that saved the day. And few were a match for the little boy in Pham Nuwen. !ID Heh, heh. Start a Qeng Ho news group (probably started by Old One)
! Sigh. But even that could be a lie.

"I was almost the perfect skipper. Almost. I always wanted to see what was beyond the space we had good records on. Every time I got really rich, so rich I could launch my own subfleet -- I'd take some crazy chance and lose everything. I was the yo-yo of the Fleet. One run I'd be captain of five, the next I'd be pulling maintenance programming on some damn container ship. Given how time stretches out with sublight commerce, there were whole generations who thought I was a legendary genius -- and others who used my name as a synonym for goofball." ^ ?QU ask around about the consequences of this Captain mystery
!QU PRB Do you want him to be so sexist? Doesn't seem like you could say
! he was flexible then? Maybe Ravna could just muse about how
! selectively flexible he was
^ V June 11, 1991 tojrf: "wild witless bird" is actually a realistically
^ V necessary circumlocution, but is it too inconsistent with my
^ V incaution elsewhere?

He paused and his eyes widened in pleased surprise. "Ha! I remember what I was doing there at the end. I was in the 'goofball' part of my cycle, but it didn't matter. There was this captain of twenty who was even crazier than I.... Can't remember her name. Her? Couldn't have been; I'd never serve under a fem captain." He was almost talking to himself. "Anyway, this guy was willing to bet everything on the sort of thing normal folks would argue about over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something like 'wild witless bird' -- that gives you the idea about him. He figured there must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere in the universe. The problem was to find them. In a strange way, he had almost guessed about the Zones. Only problem was, he wasn't crazy enough; he got one little thing wrong. Can you guess what?"
Ravna nodded. Considering where Pham's wreck was found, it was obvious. !IMP QU PRB Critique/clean up the astrophysics here
!qU Is it too jarring to use a real name like Qeng Ho?
^ ?jrf No, but in this case<?>, too <illeg> Qeng Ho
!QU PRB at speeds as low as 0.3c, the real difference between objective
! and subjective time is insignificant, so is it still okay for me to use
! the terms (presumably in reference to coldsleep)
!IMP Somewhere (hopefully in n7) you want to note that the notion of
! something like the Zones did show up in fiction (though it's reasonable
! that it was insignificant, if there are good explanations for nature
! to Slow Zone civilizations)

"Yeah. I'll bet it's an idea older than spaceflight: the 'elder races' must be toward the galactic core, where stars are closer and there are black hole exotica for power. He was taking his entire fleet of twenty. They'd keep going till they found somebody or had to stop and colonize. This captain figured success was unlikely in our lifetime. But with proper planning we could end up in a close-packed region where it would be easy to found a new Qeng Ho -- and it would proceed even further. !QU Have I made it sufficiently plausible why ftl and intelligence is
! connected with the Zones?
!jrf Not really, so far
!QU is this too much like the experience of Tunç Blumenthal?

"Anyway, I was lucky to get aboard even as a programmer; this captain knew all the wrong things about me."
The expedition lasted a thousand years, penetrating two hundred and fifty light-years galactic inward. The Qeng Ho volume was closer to the Bottom of the Slowness than Old Earth, and they were proceeding inwards from there. Even so, it was plain bad luck that they encountered the edge of the Deeps after only two hundred and fifty light-years. One after another, the Wild Witless Bird lost contact with the other ships. Sometimes it happened without warning, other times there was evidence of computer failure or gross incompetence. The survivors saw a pattern, guessed that common components were failing. Of course, no one connected the problems with the region of space they were entering.
"We backed down from ram speeds, found a solar system with a semi-habitable planet. We'd lost track of everybody else.... Just what we did then isn't real clear to me." He gave a dry laugh. "We must have been right at the edge, staggering around at about IQ 60. I remember fooling with the life support system. That's probably what actually killed us." For a moment he looked sad and bewildered. He shrugged. "And then I woke up in the tender clutches of Vrinimi Org, here where faster-than-light travel is possible ... and I can see the edge of Heaven itself." !Chapter TITLE: "God in a Box", trouble is, that's awfully close to
! Barry Longyear's The God Box
!INCON? you imply a little further on that 20 worlds are associated
! with Sjandra Kei. Even if you change the name, you should redo
! your chron and population growth calculations
!V Go for 3 worlds, 2 in one system
!IMP PRB somewhere have to talk about the possibility of just making
! copies of Pham Nuwen -- June 11, 1991 TUF
!ID while with the Org, her name might be Ravna Vrinimi Human Bergsndot
!PRB QU that Powers would be interested in him in particular
!V ... this because they can't be more than 3 weeks flight from
!V Sjandra Kei (this before the storms). Of course, Pham turns
!V turns out to be a setup

Ravna didn't say anything for a moment. She looked across her beach into the surf. They'd been talking a long time. The sun was peeking under the tree petals, its light shifting across her office. Did Grondr realize what he had here? Almost anything from the Slow Zone had collector's value. People fresh from the Slowness were even more valuable. But Pham Nuwen might be unique. He had personally experienced more than had some whole civilizations, and ventured into the Deeps to boot. She understood now why he looked to the Transcend and called it "Heaven". It wasn't entirely naïveté, nor a failure in the Organization's education programs. Pham Nuwen had already been through two transforming experiences, from pre-tech to star- traveler, and star-traveler to Beyonder. Each was a jump almost beyond imagination. Now he saw that another step was possible, and was perfectly willing to sell himself to take it.
So why should I risk my job to change his mind? But her mouth was living a life of its own. "Why not postpone the Transcend, Pham? Take some time to understand what is here in the Beyond. You'd be welcome in almost any civilization. And on human worlds you'd be the wonder of the age." A glimpse of non-Nyjoran humanity. The local newsgroups at Sjandra Kei had thought Ravna radically ambitious to take a 'prenticeship twenty thousand light-years away. Coming back from it, she would have her pick of Full Academician jobs on any of a dozen worlds. That was nothing compared to Pham Nuwen; there were folks so rich they might give him a world if he would just stay. "You could name your price."
The redhead's lazy smile broadened. "Ah, but you see, I've already named my price, and I think Vrinimi can meet it."
I really wish I could do something about that smile, thought Ravna. Pham Nuwen's ticket to the Transcend was based on a Power's sudden interest in the Straumli perversion. This innocent's ego might end up smeared across a million death cubes, running a million million simulations of human nature. !jrf2 What are "death cubes"? What does this mean? June 11, 1991 TUF






!ID IMP Somewhere might remark [excuse, actually] the fact that some
! alien races seem so un-alien. Also, you should work on getting more
! alienness. These guys are all like members of the same culture much
! less different races from different planets
!hld They use "tech-tools" to mask alieness adequately to have data
!hld and artefact trading work -- very large superset of AI aided
!hld translators. Most "aliens" never get to see "real" aspect of
!hld other species. Exception for academic specialists and "cultural
!hld engineers".
^
!PRB Maybe you should have her worrying a little more about Org ethics;
! seems reasonable that if they are very good about caring for employees,
! that strong reciprocity is expected

Grondr called less than five minutes after Pham Nuwen's departure. Ravna knew the Org would be eavesdropping, and she'd already told Grondr her misgivings about this "selling" of a sophont. Nevertheless, she was a bit nervous to see him.
"When is he actually going to leave for the Transcend?"
Grondr rubbed at his freckles. He didn't seem angry. "Not for ten or twenty days. The Power that's negotiating for him is more interested in looking at our archives and watching what's passing through Relay. Also ... despite the human's enthusiasm for going, he's really quite cautious."
"Oh?"
"Yes. He's insisting on a library budget, and permission to roam anywhere in the system. He's been chatting with random employees all over the Docks. He was especially insistent about talking to you." Grondr's mouth parts clicked in a smile. "Feel free to speak your mind to him. Basically, he's tasting around for hidden poison. !jrf What does this mean?
!V Presumably this is a 'Kalir idiom
!V It means "looking for the hidden 'gotcha'"
Hearing the worst from you should make him trust us."
She was coming to understand Grondr's confidence. Damn but Pham Nuwen had a thick head. "Yes sir. He's asked me to show him around the Foreign Quarter tonight." As you well know. !hld Would Skandr's displays be visible to Ravna, or would it be some
! sort
!hld of direct connect?

"Fine. I wish the rest of the deal were going as smoothly." Grondr turned so that only peripheral freckles were looking in her direction. He was surrounded by status displays of the Org's communication and database operations. From what she could see, things were remarkably busy. "Maybe I should not bring this up, but it's just possible you can help.... Business is very brisk." Grondr did not seem pleased to report the good news. "We have nine civilizations from the Top of the Beyond that are bidding for wide band data feeds. That we could handle. But this Power that sent a ship here...." !jrf Have we heard about this sending before?
!V Yes, explicitly in c06

Ravna interrupted almost without thinking, a breach that would have horrified her a few days earlier. "Just who is it, by the way? Any chance we're entertaining the Straumli Perversion?" The thought of that taking the redhead was a chill. !JLC mildly questions not have a reference to Powers beyond the Powers
! here
!V April 13, 1991 Might have Old One also be amused by this name (c16)
!V June 11, 1991 -- NÆH

"Not unless all the Powers are fooled, too. Marketing calls our current visitor 'Old One'." He smiled. "That's something of a joke, but true even so. We've known it for eleven years." No one really knew how long Transcendent beings lived, but it was a rare Power that stayed communicative for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something different -- or really did die. There were a million explanations, thousands that were allegedly from the Powers first hand. Ravna guessed that the true explanation was the simplest one: intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change. Dumb animals can change only as fast as natural evolution. Human equivalent races, once on their technological run-up, hit the limits of their zone in a matter of a few thousand years. In the Transcend, superhumanity can happen so fast that its creators are destroyed. It wasn't surprising then that the Powers themselves were evanescent. !JLC says this next sentence is awkward
!hld Are Powers evanescent, or do they evolve into less and less
!hld comprehensible/physical entities

So calling an eleven-year Power "Old One" was almost reasonable.
"We believe that Old One is a variant on the Type 73 pattern. Such are rarely malicious -- and we know from whom it Transcended. Just now it's causing us major discomfort, though. For twenty days it has been monopolizing an enormous and increasing percentage of Relay bandwidth. Since its ship arrived, it's been all over the archive and our local nets. We've asked Old One to send noncritical data by starship, but it refuses. This afternoon was the worst yet. Almost five percent of Relay's capacity was bound up in its service. And the creature is sending almost as much downlink as it is receiving uplink." ^ V July 19, 1991 I'm leaving this downlink reference, else there
^ V are serious questions about why they didn't offer simply to
^ V ship a copy of the whole archive.
^
^ V July 19, 1991 someplace have a note about archive freighters
^ V IMP ID archive theft and archive copying (could be that
^ V copying is hard)
!IMP Give Grondr an explicit race, and use that in the ms: Kalir
!ID come up with a consistent system of classes for powers, and put
! Old One in it NÆH
!QU REN alternatives to "Old One"?
! JLC: The Newly Ancient
! MG: Old Fogey, El Viejo
! VSV: Old Hand
!!! jrf IMP Define exactly what we mean by "a Power"!
!!! V I think I have done so now.
! See the Prolog, and also the first
!!! V discussion between Ravna and Grondr.
!jrf2 ok

That was weird, but, "It's still paying for the business, isn't it? If Old One can pay top price, why do you care?" !hld Take payment from Old One in enhancements to Relay to offload
! existing
!hld facilities
!V PRB hld suggestion is apt here

"Ravna, we hope our Organization will be around for many years after the Old One is gone. There is nothing it could offer us that would be good through all that time." Ravna nodded. Actually, there were certain "magic" automations that might work down here, but their long-term effectiveness would be dubious. This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course. "Old One can easily top any bid from the Middle Beyond. But if we give it all the services it demands, we'll be effectively nonfunctional to the rest of our customers -- and they are the people we must depend on in the future." ^ page 93, INSERT L [a separate paragraph]:

His image was replaced by an archive access report. Ravna was very familiar with the format, and Grondr's complaint really hit home. The Known Net was a vast thing, a hierarchical anarchy that linked hundreds of millions of worlds. Yet even the main trunks had bandwidths like something out of Earth's dawn age; a wrist dataset could do better on a local net. That's why bulk access to the Archive was mostly local -- to media freighters visiting the Relay system. But now ... during the last hundred hours, remote access to the Archive, both by volume and by count, had been higher than local! And ninety percent of those accesses were from a single account -- Old One's. ^ FRAG
^
Grondr's image was replaced by a couple of communication
^ traffic graphics. One showed archive usage, something Ravna was quite
^ familiar with by now. The archive at Relay was a double money-maker,
^ since before people could pay to see the data they had to rent
^ connect time. For millions of users, the cost was worth it, since
^ most other old archives were in decrepit civilizations with crummy
^ front ends.
^
In the last hundred hours, usage was unpleasantly close to
^ saturation. Nearly twenty percent of all accesses were from a single
^ account -- Old One's.

Grondr's voice continued from behind the graphics. "We've got one backbone transceiver dedicated to this Power right now.... Frankly, we can't tolerate this for more than a few days; the ultimate expense is just too great." !ID Powers only seem fickle/capricious because of our small interface
! with them

Grondr's face was back on the display. "Anyway, I think you can see that the deal for the barbarian is really the least of our problems. The last twenty days have brought more income than the last two years -- far more than we can verify and absorb. We're endangered by our own success." He made an ironic smile-frown.





!V February 9, 1991 not too IMP Somewhere do your processing
!V commentary on what agrav is

They talked a few minutes about Pham Nuwen, and then Grondr rang off. Afterwards, Ravna took a walk along her beach. The sun was well down toward the aft horizon, and the sand was just pleasantly warm against her feet; the Docks went round the planet once every twenty hours, circling the pole at about forty degrees north latitude. She walked close to the surf, where the sand was flat and wet. The mist off the sea was moist against her skin. The blue sky just above the white-tops shaded quickly to indigo and black. Specks of silver moved up there, agrav floaters bringing starships into the Docks. The whole thing was so fabulously, unnecessarily expensive. Ravna was by turns grossed out and bedazzled. Yet after two years at Relay, she was beginning to see the point. Vrinimi Org wanted the Beyond to know that it had the resources to handle whatever communication and archive demands might be made on it. And they wanted the Beyond to suspect that there were hidden gifts from the Transcend here, things that might make it more than a little dangerous to invaders.
She stared into the spray, feeling it bead on her lashes. So Grondr had the big problem right now: how do you tell a Power to take a walk? All Ravna Bergsndot had to worry about was one overconfident twit who seemed hell-bent on destroying himself. She turned and paralleled the water. Every third wave it surged over her ankles.
She sighed. Pham Nuwen was beyond doubt a twit ... but what an awesome one. Intellectually, she had always known that there was no difference in the possible intelligence of Beyonders and the primitives of the Slowness. Most automation worked better in the Beyond; ultralight communication was possible. But you had to go to the Transcend to build truly superhuman minds. So it shouldn't be surprising that Pham Nuwen was capable. Very capable. He had picked up Triskweline with incredible ease. She had little doubt that he was the master skipper he claimed. And to be a trader in the Slowness, to risk centuries between the stars for a destination that might have fallen from civilization or become deadly hostile to outsiders ... that took courage that was hard to imagine. She could understand how he might think going to the Transcend was just another challenge. He'd had less than twenty days to absorb a whole new universe. That simply wasn't enough time to understand that the rules change when the players are more than human.
Well, he still had a few days of grace. She would change his mind. And after talking to Grondr just now, she wouldn't feel especially guilty about doing it. !jrf What's this last sentence about?
!V I referring to the fact that she intends to change Pham's mind
! about
!V "selling" himself to Old One
^ V IMPER PRB INCON <= Human equivalent "mechanical" intelligences ought
^ V to possible in the Slow Zone (though not built from scratch:
^ V building an AI from scratch by a Slow Zone civilization would be
^ V theoretically possible, but is highly impractical without more
^ V advanced development environments. Even if it could be done
^ V it would take more compute time to set up than these civilizations
^ V can normally live).
^ V June 11, 1991 : Not sure how serious this is

!ID recommend you change to the following indent for CHAPTERs, so as
! to avoid bad autoindenting
!PRB How to make Relay sufficiently wild (but not too wild)
! MG Magic -- human equivalents scuttling around under foot
! MG Toroid of black holes with a Transcend in the middle
! VSV fractal complex of floaters JLC: sounds neat
! Hmm raises interesting image of a large structure of this sort
! with the lowest layers being a mecrobe level
!jrf |||||||?