A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge Page A

had a structural failure -- or perhaps the crew was affected by the Depths. Either way, they ended up in a frozen mangle."
    Tragedy at the bottom of the Slowness, thousands of years ago. Ravna forced her eyes from the carnage. "You figure on selling this to our visitor?"
    "Even better. Once we started poking around, we discovered a substantial error in the cataloging. One of the deaders is almost intact. We patched it up with parts from the others. It was expensive, but we ended up with a living human." The picture flickered again, and Ravna caught her breath. In the medical animation, the parts floated into an orderly arrangement. There was a complete body there, torn up a little in the belly. Pieces came together, and ... this was no "she". He floated whole and naked, as if in sleep. Ravna had no doubt of his humanity, but all humankind in the Beyond was descended from Nyjoran stock. This fellow had none of that heritage. The skin was smoky gray, not brown. The hair was bright reddish brown, a color she had only seen in pre-Nyjoran histories. The bones of the face were subtly different from modern humans. The small differences were more jarring than the outright alienness of her coworkers.
    Now the figure was clothed. Under other circumstances, Ravna would have smiled. Grondr 'Kalir had picked an absurd costume, something from the Nyjoran era. The figure bore a sword and slug gun.... A sleeping prince from the Age of Princesses.
    "Behold the Ur-human," said Grondr.
     
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    -=*=-

CHAPTER 7
     
    "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.
    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.
    And now I have my own office here. Working directly for Grondr 'Kalir had its perks. Ravna kicked back in her chair