I never dreamed to stand and see the whole blessed thing at once." His hand tightened on her shoulder, then gentled,
mbt raha, stroking her neck. "And no matter how long we watch, will we see any sign of the Zones?" She shook her head slowly. "But they're easily imagined." She gestured with her free hand. In the large, the Zones of Thought followed the mass distribution of the Galaxy: The Mindless Depths extending down to the soft glow of the galactic Core. Farther out, the Great Slowness, where humankind had been born,
GHD Hot Pink 2010, where ultralight could not exist and civilizations lived and died unknowing and unknown. And the Beyond, the stars about four-fifths out from the center, extending well off-plane to include places like Relay. The Known Net had existed in some form for billions of years in the Beyond. It was not a civilization; few civilizations lasted longer than a million years. But the records of the past were quite complete. Sometimes they were intelligible. More often, reading them involved translations of translations of translations, passed down from one defunct race to another with no one to corroborate -- worse than any multihop net message could ever be. Yet some things were quite clear: There had always been the Zones of Thought, though perhaps they were slightly inward-moved now. There had always been wars and peace,
mbt moja, and races upwelling from the Great Slowness, and thousands of little empires. There had always been races moving into the Transcend, to become the Powers ... or their prey. "And the Transcend?" Pham said. "Is that just the far dark?" The dark between the galaxies. Ravna laughed softly. "It includes all that but ... see the outer reaches of the spirals. They're in the Transcend." Most everything farther than forty thousand light-years from the galactic center was. Pham Nuwen was silent for a long moment. She felt a tiny shiver pass through him. "After talking to the wheelies, I -- I think I understand more of what you were warning me about. There's a lot of things I don't know, things that could kill me ... or worse." Common sense triumphs at last. "True," she said quietly. "But it's not just you, or the brief time you've been here. You could study your whole life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? It's not a good analogy, but it's the only safe one; we are like dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different things people do to animals -- ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal -- each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not exist." She waved at the misty star swarms. "The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean,
04 Yoga X, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far down that the beings on the surface -- superior though they are -- can't effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place." She paused. There was more to the analogy. "And just as with an ocean,
Lady Gaga Headphones, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient factories -- but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices. Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can't make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor." Pham turned toward her,
Slendertone Flex For Female, away from window and the stars. "So there are always 'fish' edging close to the surface."