At the end of each work day they would all meet on the command deck, to compare notes, to consider the latest from Jefri and Mr. Steel, to review the drive status. For Ravna this could be the happiest time of the day… and sometimes the hardest. Pham had rigged the display automation to show castle walls all around. A huge fireplace replaced the normal window on comm status. The sound of it was almost perfect; he had even coaxed a small amount of "fire" heat from that wall. This was a castle hall out of Pham's memory, from Canberra he said. But it wasn't that different from the Age of Princesses on Nyjora (though most of those castles had been in tropical swamps, where big fireplaces were rarely used). For some perverse reason, even the Riders seemed to enjoy it; Greenstalk said it reminded her of a trading stop from her first years with Blueshell. Like travelers who have walked through a long day, the four of them rested in the coziness of a phantom lodge. And when the new business was settled, Pham and the Riders would trade stories, often late into the "night".

Ravna sat beside him, the least talkative of the four. She joined in the laughter and sometimes the discussion: There was the time Blueshell had a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption, and Ravna knew some stories of her own to illustrate the Rider's opinion. But this was also the hardest time for her. Yes, the stories were wonderful. Blueshell and Greenstalk had been so many places, and at heart they were traders. Swindles and bargains and good done were all part of their lives. Pham listened to his friends, almost enraptured… and then told his own stories, of being a prince on Canberra, of being a Slow Zone trader and explorer. And for all the limitations of the Slowness, his life's adventures surpassed even the Skroderiders'. Ravna smiled and tried to pretend enthusiasm.

For Pham's stories were too much. He honestly believed them, but she couldn't imagine one human seeing so much, doing so much. Back on Relay, she had claimed his memories were synthetic, a little joke of Old One. She had been very angry when she said it, and more than anything she wished she never had… because it was so clearly the truth. Greenstalk and Blueshell never noticed, but sometimes in the middle of a story Pham would stumble on his memories and a look of barely concealed panic would come to his eyes. Somewhere inside, he knew the truth too, and she suddenly wanted to hug him, comfort him. It was like having a terribly wounded friend, with whom you can talk but never mutually admit the scope of the injuries. Instead she pretended the lapses didn't exist, smiling and laughing at the rest of his story.

And Old One's jape was all so unnecessary. Pham didn't have to be a great hero. He was a decent person, though ebullient and kind of a rule-breaker. He had every bit as much persistence as she, and more courage.

What craft Old One must have had to make such a person, what… Power. And how she hated Him, for making a joke of such a person.

Of Pham's godshatter, there was scarcely a sign. For that Ravna was very grateful. Once or twice a month he had a dreamy spell. For a day or two after he would go nuts with some new project, often something he couldn't clearly explain. But it wasn't getting worse; he wasn't drifting away from her.

"And the godshatter may save us in the end," he would say when she had the courage to ask him about it. "No, I don't know how." He tapped his forehead. "It's still god's own crowded attic up here. "It's more than memory. Sometimes it needs all my mind to think with and there's no room left for self-awareness, and afterwards I can't explain, but… sometimes I have a glimmer. Whatever Jefri's parents brought to the Tines' world: it can hurt the Blight. Call it an antidote — better yet, a countermeasure. Something taken from the Perversion as it was aborning in the Straumli lab. Something the Perversion didn't even suspect was gone until much later."

Ravna sighed. It was hard to imagine good news that was also so frightening. "The Straumers could sneak something like that right out from the Perversion's heart?"

"Maybe. Or maybe, Countermeasure used the Straumers to escape the Perversion. To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the plan might work, Rav, at least if I — if Old One's godshatter — can get down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of the Beyond upside down — hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it's looking in all the wrong places. We'll have our chance at Countermeasure."

She thought of Jefri's messages. "The rot on the walls of Jefri's ship. You think that's what it is?"

Pham's eyes went vague. "Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He seems a little disgusted by it… That's good, probably keeps his Tinish friends away from it."

A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham's mind too. And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would stand before that unknown and Old One's dead hand would act… through Pham. Ravna shivered, and didn't say anything more for a time.

Month by month, the gunpowder project stayed right on the schedule of the library's development program. The Tines had been able to make the stuff easily; there had been very little backtracking through the development tree. Alloy testing had been the critical event that slowed things, but they were over the hump there too. The packs of "Hidden Island" had built the first three prototypes: breech-loading cannon that were small enough to be carried by a single pack. Jefri guessed they could begin mass production in another ten days.

The radio project was the weird one. In one sense it was behind schedule; in another, it had become something more than Ravna had ever imagined. After a long period of normal progress, Jefri had come back with a counterplan. It consisted of a complete reworking of the tables for the acoustic interface.

"I thought these jokers were first-time medievals," Pham Nuwen said when he saw Jefri's message.

"That's right. And in principle, they just reasoned out consequences to what we sent them. The want to support pack-thought across the radio."

"Hunh. Yes. We described how the tables specified the transducer grid — all in nontechnical Samnorsk. That included showing how small table changes would make the grid different. But look, our design would give them a three kilohertz band — a nice, voice-grade connection. You're telling me that implementing this new table would give'em two hundred kilohertz."

"Yes. That's what my dataset says."

He grinned his cocky smile. "Ha! And that's my point. Sure, in principle we gave them enough information to do the mod. It looks to me like making this expanded spec table is equivalent to solving a, hmm," he counted rows and columns, "a five-hundred-node numerical PDE. And little Jefri claims that all his datasets are destroyed, and that his ship computer is not generally usable."

Ravna leaned back from the display. "Sorry. I see what you mean." You get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget what it must be like without them. "You… you think this might be, uh, Countermeasure's doing?"

Pham Nuwen hesitated, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility. Then, "No… no, it's not that. I think this 'Mister Steel' is playing games with our heads. All we have is a byte stream from 'Jefri'. What do we really know about what's going on?"

"Well, I'll tell you some things I know. We are talking to a young human child who was raised in Straumli Realm. You've been reading most of his messages in Trisk translation. That loses a lot of the colloquialisms and the little errors of a child who is a native speaker of Samnorsk. The only way this might be faked is by a group of human adults… And after twenty plus weeks of knowing Jefri, I'll tell you even that is unlikely."