It had been two years since Ravna Bergsndot left Sjandra Kei. In some ways the time had gone fast. Just now her body was telling her what a long, long time it had really been. Every touch was so vivid, waking desires carefully suppressed. Suddenly her skin was tingling all over. It took marvelous restraint to undress without tearing anything.

Ravna was out of practice. And of course she had nothing recent to compare to… But Pham Nuwen was very, very good.

— =*=

Crypto: 0

As received by: Transceiver Relay01 at Relay

Language path: Acquileron-»Triskweline, SjK:Relay units

From: Net Administrator for Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down

Subject: Complaints about Relay, a suggestion

Summary: It's getting worse; try us instead

Key phrases: communications problems, Relay unreliability, Transcend

Distribution:

Communication Costs Special Interest Group, Motley Hatch Administration Group, Transceiver Relay01 at Relay, Transceiver Not-for-Long at Shortstop,

Follow-ups to: Windsong Expansion Interest Group

Date: 07:21:21 Docks Time, 36/09 of Org year 52089

Text of message:

During the last five hundred hours, Comm Costs shows 9,834 transceiver-layer congestion complaints against the Vrinimi operation at Relay. Each of these complaints involves services to tens of thousand of planets. Vrinimi has promised again and again that the congestion is a purely temporary increase of Transcendent usage.

As Relay's chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we thought it inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the problem.

The events of the last seven hours compel us to change this policy. Those reading this item already know about the incident; most of you are the victims of it. Beginning at [00:00:27 Docks Time], Vrinimi Org began taking transceivers off-line, an unscheduled outage. R01 went out at 00:00:27, R02 at 02:50:32, R03 and R04 at 03:12:01. Vrinimi stated that a Transcendent customer was urgently requesting bandwidth. (R00 had been previously dedicated to that Power's use.) The customer required use of both up— and down-link bandwidth. By the Org's own admission, the unscheduled usage exceeded sixty percent of their entire capacity. Note that the excesses of the preceding five hundred hours — excesses which caused entirely justified complaint — were never more than five percent of Org capacity.

Friends, we of Windsong are in the long-haul communication business. We know how difficult it is to maintain transceiver elements that mass as much as a planet. We know that hard contract commitments simply cannot be made by suppliers in our line of work. But at the same time, the behavior of Vrinimi Org is unacceptable. It's true that in the last three hours the Org has returned R01 through R04 to general service, and promised to pass on the Power's surpayment to all those who were "inconvenienced". But only Vrinimi knows how large these surpayments really are. And no one (not even Vrinimi!) knows whether this is the end of the outages.

What is to Vrinimi a sudden, incredible cash glut, is to the rest of you an unaccountable disaster.

Therefore Windsong at Debley Down is considering a major — and permanent — expansion of our service: the construction of five additional backbone transceivers. Obviously this will be immensely expensive. Transceivers are never cheap, and Debley Down does not have quite the geometry enjoyed by Relay. We expect the cost must be amortized over many decades of good business. We can't undertake it without clear customer commitment. In order to determine this demand, and to ensure that we build what is really needed, we are creating a temporary newsgroup, Windsong Expansion Interest Group, moderated and archived at Windsong. Send/Receive charges to transceiver-layer customers on this group will be only ten percent our usual. We urge you, our transceiver-layer customers, to use this service to talk to each other, to decide what you can safely expect from Vrinimi Org in the future and how you feel about our proposals.

We are waiting to hear from you.

— =*=

Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly around… a large pillow. Damn. He'd already left. She lay back for a second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last night she hadn't realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense

… what a strange thing.

The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive nonsense. "Yes?"

It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? "I'm sorry to bother you, Ravna, but — are you all right?" The Rider interrupted herself.

Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange: sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. "Yes, I'm fine." Fine! "What's up?"

"We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were so highly placed. We'd been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we were told the survey is being undertaken immediately."

"Um." Say what? "That's wonderful, but I'm not sure I — who's paying for it, anyway?"

"I don't know, but it is expensive. We were told they're dedicating a backbone transceiver to the search. If there's anyone transmitting, we should know in a matter of hours."

They chatted for a few more minutes, Ravna gradually becoming more coherent as she parceled the various aspects of the last ten hours into business and pleasure. She had half expected the Org to bug her at The Wandering Company. Maybe Grondr just heard the story there — and gave it full credit. But just yesterday, he'd been wimping about transceiver saturation. Either way, this was good news — perhaps extraordinarily good. If the Riders' wild story were true, the Straumli Perversion might be less than Transcendent. And if the refugee ships had some clues on how to bring it down, Straumli Realm might even be saved.

After Greenstalk rang off, Ravna wandered about the apartment, getting herself in shape, playing the various possibilities against each other. Her actions became more purposeful, almost up to their usual speed. There were a lot of things she wanted to check into.

Then the phone was ringing again. This time she previewed the caller. Oops! It was Grondr Vrinimikalir. She combed her hand back through her hair; it still looked like crap, and this phone was not up to deception. Suddenly she noticed that Grondr didn't look so hot either. His facial chitin was smudged, even across some of his freckles. She accepted the call.

"Ah!" His voice actually squeaked, then returned to its normal level. "Thank you for answering. I would have called earlier, except things have been very… chaotic." Just where had his cool distance gone? "I just want you to know that the Org had nothing to do with this. We were totally taken in until just a couple of hours ago." He launched into a disjointed description of massive demand swamping the Org's resources.

As he rambled, Ravna punched up a summary of recent Relay business. By the Powers that Be: Sixty percent diversion? Excerpts from Comm Costs: She scanned quickly down the item from Windsong. The gasbags were as pompous as ever, but their offer to replace Relay was probably for real. It was just the sort of thing Grondr had been afraid might happen.