Which zone is the OnOff system in?

Question

In A Deepness in the Sky, the OnOff star and the spider's planet both exhibit unusual properties. The star itself spends most of its time essentially dark; while the planet contains minerals which seem to have antigravity properties.

These are not characteristics typical of the slow zone, and seem like they could result from the system being located in a higher zone of thought. However the human fleets which reach the planet are clearly comprised of slow zone ships.

What zone of thought is the OnOff system in?

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Edit / Notes:

In Deepness the concept of zones of thought is apparently unknown to all the characters (and I think not even mentioned in that book itself). However, that doesn't mean that they haven't stumbled in ignorance out of the slow zone or perhaps into a region which oscillates between zones.

Also we learn in A Fire Upon the Deep that Pham Nyguen (or his body anyway) ends up in a higher zone of thought. This also tends to suggest that the region that the Qeng Ho operate in or where he went after On/Off could be at least relatively near (on a galactic scale) to the zone boundary.

Answer 1

It's been a while since I read it, but my memory is that within the Deepness in the Sky setting, there are no zones other than what is referred to as the "Slow Zone" in Fire Upon the Deep. That is:

• There is no mention of the Zones, let alone of the characters being aware of them.
• All of the travel is sublight speed.
• At the end of Deepness in the Sky, Pham Nuwen embarks on a journey to the center of the galaxy. As detailed in Fire Upon the Deep that this put him in the "Unthinking Depths". If humanity had been aware of The Beyond and how the Zones work, surely Pham would have wanted to go to The Beyond, not the Unthinking Depths.

We also have the Emergents using people as makeshift AI, and if there were in the Beyond, they would just use actual AI.

wikipedia has this to say:

A Deepness in the Sky takes place in the Slow Zone, though Vinge does not explain the connections, and the characters in the story remain unaware of the zones' existence. The sun's inexplicably strange behavior, the unusual planetary system (with only a solitary planet and several asteroid-sized diamonds), and the discovery of "cavorite" on the planet may indicate the system originated in the Transcend, though it is currently moving outward from the Unthinking Depths. Vinge's characters speculate that the Spiders descend from an ancient star-faring civilization, and that the anti-gravity material and other strange artifacts have connections with that civilization. Unfortunately, they guess the structure of the Zones (though not the actual properties) backwards, coming to the conclusion that the bright center of the galaxy is the most likely location for advanced civilization. This leads Pham on his path inwards to the Unthinking Depths, and his eventual resurrection.

The implied sequence of events is this: The Spiders' planet was originally in the Beyond, on the other side of the galaxy from where the Qeng Ho and Emergents found it. It then traveled into the Slow Zone, eventually passing through the lower portion of the Slow Zone and possibly the upper edge of the Unthinking Depths, causing a collapse of the civilization. It then came out the other side, continuing on back toward The Beyond. Eventually, its increased distance from the galactic core, along with time for its inhabitants to rebuild, resulted in the Spiders reaching a 20th century Earth level of technology, and the radio emissions of their civilization alerted the Qeng Ho and Emergents to their presence. Pham Nuwen, seeing that the planet had signs of previously advanced technology, and observing it traveling away from the galactic core, incorrectly surmised that the galactic core was a region of advanced technology.

Answer 2

The OnOff system is in the Slow Zone but there are artifacts from other Zones in the system, including the OnOff star itself:

1. The system is in the Slow Zone

Paleontological evidence on the Spider world indicate no external visitation for millions of years - if the planet were in the Beyond, it would have been colonized by one of the millions of civilizations that inhabit the Beyond, and travel freely in it.

2. The On-Off Star may be an artifact

2a) Beyond artifacts can survive in lower Zones

From A Fire Upon the Deep

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. ... 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.

2b) the On/Off star is such an artifact.

In Deepness in the Sky, the Focused scientist Wen says

“Things are happening that we can’t see. Relight, a light curve vaguely like a periodic Q-nova, settling over a few Msecs to a spectrum that might almost be an explainable star riding a fusion core. And then the light slowly fades back to zero…or changes into something else we cannot see. It’s not a star at all! It’s magic. A magic machine that now is broken. I’ll bet it was a fast square-wave generator once. That’s it! Magic from the heart of the galaxy, broken now so that we can’t understand it.”

It is a bit of irony that Vinge has a near-madman reporting a distorted version of the truth, and not being believed.

Answer 3

The Qeng Ho fleet was first to arrive at the OnOff star. That might not matter. For the last fifty years of their voyage, they had watched the torch-plumes of the Emergent fleet as it decelerated toward the same destination.

_{A Deepness in the Sky, Chapter One, opening sentence}

and

... S.J. Park was smiling, too, probably with as much sincerity as Tomas Nau. Fleet Captain Park had not been popular with the Triland Forestry Department; that was partly because he cut their pre-Flight time to the bone, even when there had been no evidence of a second fleet. Park had all but fried his ramjets in a delayed deceleration, coming in just ahead of the Emergents.

_{A Deepness in the Sky, Chapter One}

Both fleets, especially the Qeng Ho, using ramships to get there despite the immediate attraction is required by the target system being in the Slow Zone.

Answer 4

There is also the possibility that the on-off star is the source of the Surge triggered by Nuwen/Old One/Countermeasure at the end of “Fire”:

In “Fire,” it is implied that whatever made Countermeasure is something “beyond the Powers” that came from the Depths, not the Transcend. This would be consistent with on-off having originated in the Depths.

The source of the Surge is clearly beneath Tines’ World, i.e. in the Slow Zone (or deeper).

The motif phrase “So high, so low” can be read as a reference to the Surge which leaps from the depths to the Transcend.

I’m currently 1/4 way through rereading it, years after my first time, and I remember thinking there was plenty more detail to support this theory, first time round!