Ravna looked up at him, and tried to get the sting out of her voice. Blueshell wasn't the proper target for her frustration. "Yup. At least five times."

"I'm sorry." He paused, going into the stillness of complete concentration. "I've committed the memory." Sometimes the habit was cute, and sometimes just irritating: When the Riders tried to think on more than one thing at a time, their Skrodes were sometimes unable to maintain short-term memory. Blueshell especially got trapped into cycles of behavior, repeating an action and immediately forgetting the accomplishment.

Pham grinned, looking a lot cooler than Ravna felt. "What I don't see is why you Riders put up with it."

"What?"

"Well, according to the ship's library, you've had these Skrode gadgets since before there was a Net. So how come you haven't improved the design, gotten rid of the silly wheels, upgraded the memory tracking? I bet that even a Slow Zone combat programmer like me could come up with a better design than the one you're riding."

"It's really a matter of tradition," Blueshell said primly, "We're grateful to Whatever gave us wheels and memory in the first place."

"Hmm."

Ravna almost smiled. By now she knew Pham well enough to guess what he was thinking — namely that plenty of Riders might have gone on to better things in the Transcend. Those remaining were likely to have self-imposed limitations.

"Yes. Tradition. Many who once were Riders have changed — even Transcended. But we persist." Greenstalk paused, and when she continued sounded even more shy than usual. "You've heard of the Rider Myth?"

"No," said Ravna, distracted in spite of herself. In the time ahead she would know as much about these Riders as about any human friends, but for now there were still surprises.

"Not many have. Not that it's a secret; it's just we don't make much of it. It comes close to being religion, but one we don't proselytize. Four or five billion years ago, Someone built the first skrodes and raised the first Riders to sentience. That much is verified fact. The Myth is that something destroyed our Creator and all its works… A catastrophe so great that from this distance it is not even understood as an act of mind."

There were plenty of theories about what the galaxy had been like in the distant past, in the time of the Ur-Partition. But the Net couldn't be forever. There had to be a beginning. Ravna had never been a big believer in Ancient Wars and Catastrophes.

"So in a sense," Greenstalk said, "we Riders are the faithful ones, waiting for What created us to return. The traditional skrode and the traditional interface are a standard. Staying with it has made our patience possible."

"Quite so," said Blueshell. "And the design itself is very subtle, My Lady, even if the function is simple." He rolled to the center of the ceiling. "The skrode of tradition imposes a good discipline — concentration on what's truly important. Just now I was trying to worry about too many things…" Abruptly he returned to the topic at hand: "Two of our drive spines never recovered from the damage at relay. Three more appear to be degrading. We thought this slow progress was just the storm, but now I've studied the spines up close. The diagnostic warnings were no false alarm."

"… and it's still getting worse?"

"Unfortunately so."

"So how bad will it get?"

Blueshell drew all his tendrils together. "My Lady Ravna, we can't be certain of the extrapolations yet. It may not get much worse than now, or -You know the OOB was not fully ready for departure. There were the final consistency checks still to do. In a way, I worry about that more than anything. We don't know what bugs may lurk, especially when we reach the Bottom and our normal automation must be retired. We must watch the drives very carefully… and hope."

It was the nightmare that haunted travelers, especially at the Bottom of the Beyond: with ultradrive gone, suddenly a light-year was not a matter of minutes but of years. Even if they fired up the ramscoop and went into cold sleep, Jefri Olsndot would be a thousand years dead before they reached him, and the secret of his parents' ship buried in some medieval midden.

Pham Nuwen waved at the slowly shifting star fields. "Still, this is the Beyond. Every hour we go farther than the fleet of Qeng Ho could in a decade." He shrugged. "Surely there's some place we can get repairs?"

"Several."

So much for "a quick flight, all unobserved". Ravna sighed. The final fitting at Relay was to include spares and Bottom compatibility software. All that was faraway might-have-beens now. She looked at Greenstalk. "Do you have any ideas?"

"About what?" Greenstalk said.

Ravna bit her lip in frustration. Some said the Riders were a race of comedians; they were indeed, but it was mostly unintentional.

Blueshell rattled at his mate.

"Oh! You mean where can we get help. Yes, there are several possibilities. Sjandra Kei is thirty-nine hundred lights spinward from here, but outside this storm. We — "

"Too far," Blueshell and Ravna spoke almost in chorus.

"Yes, yes, but remember. The Sjandra Kei worlds are mainly human, your home, my lady Ravna. And Blueshell and I know them well; after all, they were the source of the crypto shipment we brought to Relay. We have friends there and you a family. Even Blueshell agrees that we can get the work done without notice there."

"Yes, if we could get there." Blueshell's voder voice sounded petulant.

"Okay, what are the other choices?"

"They are not so well-known. I'll make a list." Her fronds drifted across a console. "Our last chance for choice is rather near our planned course. It's a single system civilization. The Net name is… it translates as Harmonious Repose."

"Rest in Peace, eh?" said Pham.

But they had agreed to voyage on quietly, always watching the bad drive spines, postponing the decision to stop for help.

The days became weeks, and weeks slowly counted into months. Four voyagers on a quest toward the Bottom. The drive became worse, but slowly, right on OOB's diagnostic projections.

The Blight continued to spread across the Top of the Beyond, and its attacks on Network archives extended far beyond its direct reach.

Communication with Jefri was improving. Messages trickled in at the rate of one or two a day. Sometimes, when OOB's antenna swarm was tuned just right, he and Ravna would talk almost in real time. Progress was being made on the Tines' world, faster than she had expected — perhaps fast enough that the boy could save himself.

It should have been a hard time, locked up in the single ship with just three others, with only a thread of communication to the outside, and that with a lost child.

In any case, it was rarely boring. Ravna found that each of them had plenty to do. For herself it was managing the ship's library, coaxing out of it the plans that would help Mr. Steel and Jefri. OOB's library was nothing compared to the Archive at Relay, or even the university libraries at Sjandra Kei, but without proper search automation it could be just as unknowable. And as their voyage proceeded, that automation need more and more special care.

And… things could never be boring with Pham around. He had a dozen projects, and curiosity about everything. "Voyaging time can be a gift," he'd say. "Now we have time to catch ourselves up, time to get ready for whatever we find ahead." He was learning Samnorsk. It went slower than his faked learning on Relay, but the guy had a natural bent for languages, and Ravna gave him plenty of practice.

He spent several hours each day in the OOB's workshop, often with Blueshell. Reality graphics were a new thing to him, but after a few weeks he was beyond toy prototypes. The pressure suits he built had power packs and weapons stores. "We don't know what things may be like when we arrive; powered armor could be real useful."