A Deepness in the Sky

FOURTEEN

Only the most literal-minded would dispute the saying “New sun, new world.” It’s true, the core of the planet is surely unchanged by the New Sun, and the continental outlines are mostly the same. But the steam-storms of the first year of the sun scour back the dry wreckage of all previous surface life. Forests and jungles, prairies and swamps, all must start again. Of Spiderkind’s surface works, only stone buildings in protected valleys may survive.

Spore-borne life spreads quickly, torn apart in the storms to sprout again and again. In the first years, higher animals may poke their snouts from deepnesses, may try to gain advantage with an early taking of territory, but it is a deadly business. The “birth of the new world” is so violent that the metaphor is strained.

…And yet, after the third or fourth year, there are occasional breaks in the storms. Avalanches and steam surges become rare, and plants can survive from year to year. In the winter season, when the winds have gentled and there is a gap between the storms, there are times when one can look out at the land and imagine this phase of the sun as an exuberance of life.

Pride of Accord was once more complete, a grander highway than ever it had been before. Victory Smith had the sports car up past sixty miles per hour on the straightaway, slowing to just under thirty when they entered a switchback. From his perch in the back, Hrunkner Unnerby had heart-stopping views of each new precipice. He held on to his perch with every hand and foot. Except for that terrorized embrace, he was sure the last turn would have flung him out the side of the auto.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have me drive, ma’am?” He asked.

Smith laughed. “And me sit back where you are? No way. I know how scary it is to watch from the back perch.”

Sherkaner Underhill tilted his head out the side window. “Um, I never realized how exciting this ride was for passengers.”

“Okay, I get the message.” Smith slowed, drove more cautiously than any of them might have done alone. In fact, road conditions were excellent. The storm had been blown away by a hot, compressional wind, leaving the concrete surface dry and clear. In another hour, they would be back in the soup. Their mountain route scraped just under ragged, fast-moving clouds, and the lands to the south were dark with the haze of rain. The view was about as open as it ever got along Pride of Accord. The forest was just two years old, hard-barked cones sprouting tear-away leaves. Most of the treelets were scarcely a yard tall, though here and there a sproutling or a softbush might reach six or ten feet. The green stretched for miles, interrupted here and there by the brown of avalanches or the spray of waterfalls. In this phase of the sun, the Westermost Forest was like God’s own lawn and from almost every point on the Pride, the travelers could see down to the ocean.

Hrunkner relaxed the grip on his perch a fraction. Behind them, he could see Smith’s security detail appear around the last switchback. For most of the trip, the escort had had no trouble staying close. For one thing, the storm and rain had kept Victory to very low speeds. Now they were scrambling, and Hrunkner wouldn’t blame them if they were steamed. Unfortunately, their commanding officer was about the only person they could complain to, and that was Victory Smith. Smith wore the uniform of a major in the Accord Quartermaster Corps. The branch wasn’t quite a lie, since Intelligence was construed as a branch of Quartermaster whenever convenient. But Smith was no major. Unnerby had been out of the service for four years, but he still had his old drinking buddies… and he knew just how the Great War had finally been won: if Victory Smith was not the new chief of Accord Intelligence, Unnerby would be enormously surprised.

There had been other surprises though—at least they’d been surprises until he thought things through. Two days ago, Smith had called, inviting him back to the Service. Today, when she showed up at his shop in Princeton, he’d half expected the discreet security—but Sherkaner Underhill’s presence had been totally unexpected. Not so surprising was the pleasure he’d felt in seeing the two again. Hrunkner Unnerby had achieved no fame for his role in truncating the Great War; it would be at least ten years before the records of their walk in the Dark were unsealed. But his share of the bounty for that mission had been twenty times his life’s savings. Finally, an excuse to quit the Service, a chance to do something constructive with his engineering background.

In the first years of a New Sun, there were enormous works to be done, under conditions that could be as dangerous as combat. In some cases real combat was involved. Even in a modern civilization, this phase of the sun was one where treachery—from theft to murder to squatting—was common. Hrunkner Unnerby had done very well, so perhaps the biggest surprise was how easy it had been for Victory Smith to persuade him to accept a thirty-day enlistment. “Just long enough to learn what we’re up to and decide whether you’d like to come back to longer service.”

Hence this trip to Lands Command. So far, it was a welcome vacation, a meeting with old friends (and it’s not often a sergeant got chauffeured by a general officer). Sherkaner Underhill was as much the unhinged genius as ever, though the nerve damage he’d suffered in their ad hoc deepness made him seem older than he was. Smith was more open and cheerful than he had ever seen her. Fifteen miles out of Princeton, beyond the temporary rowhouses and just into the foothills of the Westermost Range, the two let him in on their personal secret:

“You’re what?” Unnerby had said, almost slipping off his perch. Hot rain was slamming down all around them; maybe he hadn’t heard right.

“You heard me, Hrunkner. The General and I are wife and husband.” Underhill was grinning like an idiot.

Victory Smith raised a pointed hand. “One correction. Don’t call me General.”

Unnerby was usually better at masking astonishment; even Underhill could see this had taken him by surprise, and his grin got even broader. “Surely you had guessed there was something going on between us before the Big Dark.”

“Well…” Yes, though nothing could come of it, what with Sherkaner about to head off for his very uncertain walk in the Dark. Hrunkner had always felt sorry for the two because of that.

In fact, they did make a great team. Sherkaner Underhill had more bright ideas than any dozen people the Sergeant had ever known; but most of his ideas were grossly impractical, at least in terms of what could be accomplished in one person’s lifetime. On the other hand, Victory Smith had an eye for workable results. Why, if she hadn’t been around at just the right time that afternoon long ago, Unnerby would have booted poor Underhill all the way back to Princeton—and his mad scheme for winning the Great War would have been lost. So, yes. Except for the timing, he wasn’t surprised. And if Victory Smith was now the Director of Accord Intelligence, the country itself stood to win big. An ugly thought wormed its way to his mouth, and then seemed to pop out of its own volition: “But children? Not now of course.”

“Yup. The General’s pregnant. I’ll be carrying two baby welts on my back in less than half a year.”

Hrunkner realized he was sucking on his eating hands in embarrassment. He gargled something unintelligible. They drove for half a minute in silence, the hot rain hissing back across the windshields.How could theydo this to their own children?

Finally, the General said quietly, “Do you have a problem with this, Hrunkner?”

Unnerby wanted to swallow his hands all over again. He had known Victory Smith since the day she came into Lands Command, a spanking new junior lieutenant, a lady with an unplaced name and an undisguisable youthfulness. You saw almost everything in the military, and everybody guessed straightaway. The junior lieutenant was truly new; she was born out-of-phase. Yet somehow she’d been educated well enough to get into officer school. The rumor was that Victory Smith was the get of a rich East Coast pervert, the fellow’s family had finally disowned him, and the daughter who shouldn’t exist. Unnerby remembered the slurs and worse that had followed her everywhere for the first quarter year or so. In fact, his first glimmer that she was destined for greatness was the way she stood up to the ostracism, her intelligence and courage in facing the shame of her time of birth.

Finally he got his voice. “Uk. Yes, ma’am. I know. I meant no disrespect. I was brought up to believe a certain way,” about how decent peopleshould live. Decent people conceived their children in the Waning years, and gave birth with the new sun.

The General didn’t reply, but Underhill gave him a backhanded pat. “That’s okay, Sergeant. You should have seen my cousin’s reaction. But just wait; things change. When we have time, I’ll explain why the old rules don’t really make sense anymore.” And that was the most disquieting thing about Sherkaner Underhill: he probably could explain away their behavior—and remain blissfully remote from the rage it would cause in others.

But the embarrassing moment had passed. If these two could put up with Hrunkner’s straitlaced nature, he would do his best to ignore their… quirks. Heaven knew he had put up with worse during the war. Besides, Victory Smith was the sort who seemed to create her own propriety—and once created, it was as deep as any Unnerby had known.

As for Underhill… his attention was already elsewhere. His nervous tremor made him look old, but the mind was as sharp—or as flaky—as ever. It flitted from idea to idea, never quite coming to rest the way a normal person’s would. The rain had stopped and the wind became hot and dry. As they entered the steep country, Unnerby took a quick look at his watch and began counting how much craziness the other might come up with in the next few minutes. (1) Pointing out at the hard-armored first growth of the forest, Underhill speculated what Spiderkind might have been like if it regrew from spores after every Dark instead of emerging full-grown and with children. (2) A crack in the cloud cover appeared ahead, fortunately several miles to the side of their path. For a few minutes, the searing whiteness of once-reflected sunlight shone down upon them, clouds so bright they had to shade that side of the car. Somewhere uphill of them, direct sunlight was frying the mountainside. And Sherkaner Underhill wondered if maybe someone could build “heat farms” on the mountaintops, using temperature differentials to generate electricity for the towns below. (3) Something green scuttled across the road, narrowly avoiding their wheels. Sherkaner had a take on that, too, something about evolution and the automobile. (And Victory commented that such evolution could work both ways.) (4) Ah, but Underhill had an idea for much safer, faster transport than autos or even aircraft. “Ten minutes from Princeton to Lands Command, twenty minutes across the continent. See, you dig these tunnels along minimum-time arcs, evacuate the air from them, and just let gravity do the work.” By Unnerby’s watch, there was a five-second pause. Then: “Oops, little problem there. The minimum-time solution for Princeton to Lands Command would go down kinda deep… like six hundred miles. I probably couldn’t convince even the General to finance it.”

“You are right about that!” And the two were off in an extended argument about less-than-optimal tunnel arcs and trade-offs against air travel. The deep tunnel idea was really dumb, it turned out.

Unnerby lost track after a while. For one thing, Sherkaner was very curious about Unnerby’s construction business. The fellow was a good listener, and his questions gave Unnerby ideas he might never have had otherwise. Some of those might actually make money. Lots of money. Hmm.

Smith noticed: “Hey, I need this sergeant to be poor and in need of a generous enlistment bonus. Don’t lead him astray!”

“Sorry, dear.” But Underhill did not seem apologetic. “It’s been a long time, Hrunkner. I wish we’d seen more of you these last years. You remember back then, my big, ah—”

“Screwball idea of the moment?”

“Yes, exactly!”

“I remember just before we buttoned up in that Tiefer animal deepness, you were mumbling about this being the last Dark that civilization would ever sleep through. In the hospital afterwards, you were still going on about it. You should be a science-fiction writer, Sherkaner.”

Underhill waved a hand airily, as if acknowledging a compliment. “Actually, it’s been done in fiction. But truly, Hrunk, ours is the first era where we can make it happen.”

Hrunkner shrugged. He had walked in the Great Dark; it still made him queasy. “I’m sure there will be lots more Deep Dark expeditions, larger and better equipped than ours. It’s an exciting idea, and I’m sure the Gen—Major Smith also has all sorts of plans. I could even imagine significant battles in the middle of the Dark.”

“This is a new age, Hrunk. Look at what science is doing all around us.”

They rounded the last curve of dry roadway and plowed into a solid wall of hot rain, the storm they had seen from the north. Smith was not caught by surprise. They had their windows rolled almost all the way up, and the auto was doing only twenty miles per hour when they were enveloped. Still, the driving conditions were suddenly ghastly, the windows fogging almost too fast for the car’s blowers, the rain so thick that even with the deep-red rain lights they could barely see the edge of the roadway. The rain that spattered past the chinks in the windows was hot as a baby’s spit. Behind them, two pairs of deep-reds loomed in the darkness, Smith’s security people pulling closer.

It took a forcible effort to bring his attention back from the storm outside and remember what Underhill had been saying. “I know about the ‘Age of Science,’ Sherk. That’s been my edge in the construction business. By the last Waning we had radio, aircraft, telephones, sound recording. Even during the build-back since the New Sun, that progress has continued. Your auto is an incredible improvement over that Relmeitch you had before the Dark—and that was an expensive vehicle for its time.” And someday, Unnerby wanted to learn just how Sherkaner had obtained it on a grad student’s stipend. “Without a doubt, this is the most exciting era I could ever hope to live in. Aircraft will soon break the sound barrier. The Crown is building a national highway system. You wouldn’t be behind that, would you, Major?”

Victory smiled. “No need. There are plenty of people in Quartermaster who are. And the highway system would happen without any government help at all. But this way, we retain control.”

“So. Big things are happening. In thirty years—by the next Dark—I wouldn’t be surprised if there is worldwide air traffic, picturing telephones, maybe even rocket-borne relays that orbit the world the way the world orbits the sun. If we can avoid another war, I’m going to have the time of my life. But your idea that our entire civilization will sustain itself right through the Dark—pardon me, old Corporal, but I don’t think you’ve worked out the numbers. To do that we’d essentially have to recreate the sun. Do you have any idea of the energy involved? I remember what it took to support our diggers after Dark during the War. We used more fuel in those operations than in all the rest of the War put together.”

Ha! For once, Sherkaner Underhill didn’t have a ready reply. Then he realized that Sherk was waiting for the General to speak. After a moment, Victory Smith raised a hand. “Until now everything has been very sociable, Sergeant. I know, you’ve learned some things that enemies might make use of—clearly you’ve guessed my present job.”

“Yes. And congratulations, ma’am. Next to Strut Greenval, you’re the best that ever had that job.”

“Why… thank you, Hrunkner. But my point is that Sherkaner’s idle talk has moved us to the heart of why I asked you to take a thirty-day recruitment. What you’re going to hear now is explicitly Strategic Secret.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He hadn’t expected the mission brief to sneak up on him like this. Outside, the storm roared louder. Smith was pushing along at barely twenty miles per hour even on the straightaway. During the early years of a New Sun, even overcast days were dangerously bright, but this storm was so deep that the sky had darkened down to a murky twilight. The wind picked at the auto, trying to pry it off the road. The inside of the cab was like a steam bath.

Smith waved for Sherkaner to continue. Underhill leaned back in his perch and raised his voice to be heard over the growing storm. “As it happens, I have ‘worked out the numbers.’ After the War, I peddled my ideas around a number of Victory’s colleagues. That nearly ruined her promotion. Those cobbers can do the numbers almost as well as you. But things have changed.”

“Correction,” said Smith. “Thingsmay change.” The wind slid them toward a drop-off that Unnerby could barely see. Smith downshifted, forced the auto back toward the middle of the road.

“You see,” continued Underhill, undistracted, “there really are power sources that could support civilization through the Dark. You said we’d have to create our own sun. That’s close, even if no one knows how the sun works. But there’s theoretical and practical evidence of the power of the atom.”

A few minutes earlier, Unnerby would have laughed. Even now, he couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. “Radioactivity? You’re going to keep us warm with tons of refined radium?” Maybe the great secret was that the Crown’s high command was readingAmazing Science.

Such incredulity rolled off Underhill’s back as smoothly as ever. “There are several possibilities. If they are pursued with imagination, I have no doubt that I will have the numbers on my side by the time of the next Waning.”

And the General said, “Just so you understand, Sergeant. Ido have doubts. But this is something we can’t afford to overlook. Even if the scheme doesn’t work, thefailure could be a weapon a thousand times deadlier than anything in the Great War.”

“Deadlier than poison gas in a deepness?” Suddenly the storm outside didn’t seem as dark as what Victory Smith was saying.

He realized that for an instant all her attention was upon him. “Yes, Sergeant, worse than that. Our largest cities could be destroyed in a matter of hours.”

Underhill almost bounced off his perch. “Worst case! Worst case! That’s all you military types ever think about. Look, Unnerby. If we work at this over the next thirty years, we’ll likely have power sources that can keep buried cities—not deepnesses, but waking cities—going right through the Dark. We can keep roadways clear of ice and airsnow—and by the middle years of the Dark, they’ll stay that way. Surface transport could be much easier than it is during much of the Bright Times.” He waved at the hissing rain beyond the sports car’s windows.

“Yeah, and I suppose air transport will be likewise simplified,” with all the air lying frozen on the ground. But Unnerby’s sarcasm sounded faint even to himself.Yes, with a power source, maybe we could do it.

Unnerby’s change of heart must have shown; Underhill smiled. “You do see! Fifty years from now we’ll look back at these times and wonder why it wasn’t obvious. The Dark is actually a more benign phase than most any other time.”

“Yeah.” He shivered. Some would call it sacrilege, but—“Yeah, it would be something marvelous. You haven’t convinced me it can be done.”

“If it can be done at all, it will be very hard,” said Smith. “We have about thirty years left before the next Dark. We’ve got some physicists who think that—in theory—atomic power can work. But God Below, it wasn’t till 58//10 that they even knew about atoms! I’ve sold the High Command on this; considering the investment, I’ll surely be out of a job if it fizzles. But you know—sorry, Sherkaner—I rather hope it doesn’t work at all.”

Funny that she would support the traditional view on this.

Sherkaner: “It will be like finding a new world!”

“No! It will be like recolonizing the present one. Sherk, let’s consider the ‘best case’ scenario that you claim we narrow-minded military types always ignore. Let’s say the scientists get things figured out. Say that in ten years, or by 60//20 at the outside, we start building atomic power plants for your hypothetical ‘cities-in-the-Dark.’ Even if the rest of the world hasn’t discovered atomic power on its own, this sort of construction cannot be kept secret. So even if there is no other reason for war, there will be an arms race. And it will be a lot worse than anything in the Great War.”

Unnerby: “Ugh. Yes. The first to colonize the Dark would own the world.”

“Yes,” said Smith. “I’m not sure I’d trust the Crown to respect property in a situation like that. But Iknow the world would wake up enslaved or dead if some group like the Kindred conquered the Dark instead.”

It was the sort of self-generated nightmare that had driven Unnerby out of the military. “I hope this doesn’t sound disloyal, but have you considered killing this idea?” He waved ironically at Underhill. “You could think about other things, right?”

“Youhave lost the military view, haven’t you? But yes, I have considered suppressing this research. Just maybe—if dear Sherkaner keeps his mouth shut—that would be enough. If no one gets an early start on this business, there’s no way anybody will be ready to take over the Dark this time around. And maybe we’re generations away from putting this theory into practice—that’s what some of the physicists think.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Underhill, “this will be a matter of engineering soon enough. Even if we don’t touch it, atomic power will be a big deal in fifteen or twenty years. Only it will be too late for power plants and sealed cities. It will be too late to conquer the Dark. All atomic power will be good for is weapons. You were talking about radium, Hrunkner. Just think what large amounts of such a substance could do as a war poison. And that’s just the most obvious thing. Basically, whatever we do, civilization will be at risk. At least if we try for it all, there could be a wonderful payoff, civilization all through the Dark.”

Smith waved unhappy agreement; Unnerby had the feeling that he was witnessing a much-repeated discussion. Victory Smith had bought into Underhill’s scheme—and sold it to the High Command. The next thirty years were going to be even more exciting than Hrunkner Unnerby had thought.

They reached the mountain village very late in the day, the last three hours of the trip covering just twenty miles through the storm. The weather broke a couple of miles short of the little town.

Five years into the New Sun, Nigh’t’Deepness was mostly rebuilt. The stone foundations had survived the initial flash and the high-speed floods. As after every Dark going back many generations, the villagers had used the armored sprouts of the forest’s first growth to build the ground floors of their homes and businesses and elementary schools. Perhaps by the year 60//10 they would have better timber and would install a second floor and—at the church—perhaps a third. For now, all was low and green, the short conical logs giving the exterior walls a scaled apearance.

Underhill insisted they pass up the kerosene service station on the main road. “I know a better place,” he said, and directed Smith to drive back along the old roadway.

They had rolled down the windows. The rain had stopped. A dry, almost cool wind swept over them. There was a break in the cloud cover and for a few minutes they could see sunlight on clouds. But the light was not the murky furnace of earlier in the day. The sun must be near setting. The tumbled clouds were bright with red and orange and alpha plaid—and beyond that the blue and ultra of clear sky. Brilliance splashed the street and buildings and foothills beyond. God the surrealist.

Sure enough, at the end of the gravel path was a low barn and a single kerosene pumping station. “This is the ‘better place,’ Sherk?” asked Unnerby.

“Well… more interesting anyway,” The other opened the door and hopped off his perch. “Let’s see if this cobber remembers me.” He walked back and forth by the car, getting the kinks out. After the long drive, his tremor was more pronounced than usual.

Smith and Unnerby got out, and after a moment the proprietor, a heavy-set fellow wearing a tool pannier, came out of the barn. He was followed by a pair of children.

“Fill it up, old cobber?” the fellow said.

Underhill grinned at him, not bothering to correct the misestimate of his age. “Sure thing.” He followed the other over to the pump. The sky was even brighter now, blue and sunset reds shining down. “Remember me, do you? I used to come through in a big red Relmeitch, right before the Dark. You were a blacksmith then.”

The other stopped, took a long stare at Underhill. “The Relmeitch I remember.” His two five-year-olds danced behind him, watching the curious visitor.

“Funny how things change, isn’t it?”

The properietor didn’t know just what Underhill was talking about, but after a few moments the two were gossiping like old pals. Yes, the proprietor liked automobiles, clearly the wave of the future and no more blacksmithing for him. Sherkaner complimented him on some job he had done for him long ago, and said it was a shame that there was a kerosene filling station on the main road now. He bet it wasn’t nearly as good at repair work as here, and had the former blacksmith considered how street advertising was being done up in Princeton these days? Smith’s security pulled into the open space beyond the road, and the proprietor scarcely noticed. Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.

Meantime, Smith was across the road, talking to the captain who was running her security detail. She came back after Sherk had paid for the kerosene. “Damn. Lands Command says there’s a worse storm due in about midnight. First time I take my own car, and all hell breaks loose.” Smith sounded angry, which usually meant she was irritated with herself. They got aboard the auto. She poked at the ignition motor twice. Three times. The engine caught. “We’ll bivouac here overnight.” She sat for a moment, almost indecisive. Or maybe she was watching the sky to the south. “I know where there’s some Crown land west of town.”

Smith tooled down gravel roads, then muddy trails. Unnerby almost thought she was lost except she never hesitated or backtracked. Behind them came the security vehicles, about as inconspicuous as a parade of osprechs. The mud path petered out on a promontory overlooking the ocean. Steep slopes fell away on three sides. Someday, the forest would be tall here again, but now even the millions of armored sproutlings could not hide the naked rock of the drop-off.

Smith stopped at the dead end, and leaned back on her perch. “Sorry. I… made a wrong turn.” She waved at the first of the security vehicles pulling up behind her.

Unnerby stared out at the ocean and the sky above. Sometimes wrong turnings were the best kind. “That’s okay. God, what a view.” The breaks in the clouds were like deep canyons. The light coming down them flared red and near-red, reflections of sunset. A billion rubies glinted in the water droplets on the foliage around them. He scrambled out the back of the auto, and walked a little way through the sprouts toward the end of the promontory. The forest mat squelched deep and wet beneath his feet. After a moment, Sherkaner followed him.

The breeze coming off the ocean was moist and cool. You didn’t have to be the Met Department to know a storm was coming. He looked out over the water. They were standing less than three miles from the breakers, about as close as it was safe to be in this phase of the sun. From here you could see the turbulence and hear the grinding. Three icebergs were stranded, towering, in the surf. But there were hundreds more, stretching off to the horizon. It was the eternal battle, the fire from the New Sun against the ice of the good earth. Neither could finally win. It would be twenty years before the last of the shallows ice had surfaced and melted. By then, the sun would be waning. Even Sherkaner seemed subdued by the scene.

Victory Smith had left the auto, but instead of following them, she walked back, along the south edge of the promontory.The poor General.She can’t decide if this trip is business or pleasure. Unnerby was just as happy they wouldn’t get down to Lands Command in one whack.

They walked back to Smith. On this side of the promontory, the ground dropped into a little valley. On the high ground beyond there was some kind of building, perhaps a small inn. Smith was standing where the bedrock edge of the drop-off was nicked, and the slope was not deadly steep. Once, the road might have continued down into the little valley and up the other side.

Sherkaner stopped by his wife’s side and draped his left arms over her shoulders; after a moment she slipped two of her arms over his, never saying a word. Unnerby walked to the edge and dipped his head over the drop-off. There were traces of road cut, all the way to the bottom. But the storms and floods of the Early Bright had gouged new cliffs. The valley itself was charming, untouched and clean. “Heh, heh. No way we’re going to drive down there, ma’am. The road is washed clean away.”

Victory Smith was silent for a moment. “Yes. Washed clean. That’s for the best….”

Sherk said, “You know, we could probably walk across, and up the other side.” He jabbed a hand at the inn on the hillcrest beyond the valley. “We could see if Lady Encl—”

Victory gave him a sharp, rippling hug. “No. That place couldn’t put up more than the three of us, anyway. We’ll camp with my security team.”

After a moment, Sherk gave a little laugh. “…Fine by me. I’m curious to see a modern motorized bivouac.” They followed Smith back to the trail. By the time they reached the vehicles, Sherkaner was in full form, some scheme for lightweight tents that could survive even the storms of the First Bright.

FIFTEEN

Tomas Nau stood at his bedroom window, looking out. In fact, his rooms were fifty meters deep in Diamond One, but the view out his window was from the loftiest spire of Hammerfest. His estate had grown since the Relighting. Cut diamond slabs made adequate walls, and the surviving special craftsmen would spend their lives polishing and faceting, carving friezes as intricate as anything Nau had owned at home.

The grounds around Hammerfest had been planed smooth, tiled with metals from the ore dump on Diamond Two. He tried to keep the rockpile oriented so only Hammerfest’s flag spire actually spiked into the sunlight. The last year or so, that caution wasn’t really necessary, but staying in the shade meant that water ice could be used for shielding and some gluework. Arachna hung halfway up the sky, a brilliant blue-and-white disk almost half a degree across. Its light was bright and soft across the castle grounds. It was all quite a contrast to the first Msecs here, the hell of the Relight. Nau had worked five years to create the present view, the peace, the beauty.

Five years. And how many years more would they be stuck here? Thirty to forty was the specialists’ best estimate; however long it took the Spiders to create an industrial ecology. It was funny how things had worked out. This really was an Exile, though quite unlike what he had planned back on Balacrea. That original mission had been a different kind of calculated risk: a couple of centuries away from the increasingly deadly politics of the home regime, an opportunity to breed his resources away from poachers—and the outside, golden chance that they might learn the secrets of a star-faring nonhuman race. He hadn’t counted on the Qeng Ho arriving first.

Qeng Ho knowledge was the core of Balacrea’s Emergent civilization. Tomas Nau had studied the Qeng Ho all his life, yet till he met them he had not understood how weirdly different the Peddlers were. Their fleet had been softheaded and naive. Infecting them with timed-expression mindrot had been trivial, arranging the ambush almost as easy. But once under attack, the Peddlers had fought like devils, clever devils with a hundred surprises they must have prepared in advance. Their flagship had been destroyed in the first hundred seconds of the battle—yet that seemed only to make them more deadly killers. When finally the mindrot shut the Peddlers down, both sides were wrecked. And after the battle had come Nau’s second great misestimate of the Peddlers. Mindrot could kill Qeng Ho, but many of them could not be scrubbed or Focused. The field interrogations had gone very badly, though in the end he had turned that debacle into the means of unifying the survivors.

So Hammerfest’s attic and Focus clinic and splendid furnishings—those were cut from the ruined starships. Here and there within the ruins, high technology still functioned. All the rest must come from the raw materials of the rockpile—and the eventual civilization of the Spiders.

Thirty or forty years. They could make it. There should be enough coldsleep coffins to serve the survivors. The main thing now was to study the Spiders, learn their languages, their history and culture. To span the decades, the work was split into a tree of Watches, a few Msecs on duty, a year or two off and in coldsleep. Some, the translators and scientists, would be spending a lot of time on Watch. Others—the pilots and tactics people—would be mainly unused in the early years, then live full time toward the end of the mission. Nau had explained it all in meetings with his own people and the Qeng Ho. And what he had promised was mostly true. The Qeng Ho had great expertise in such operations; with luck, the average person would get through the Exile with only ten to twelve years of lifetime spent. Along the way, he would plunder the Peddlers’ fleet library; he would learn everything the Qeng Ho had ever learned.

Nau rested his hand against the surface of the window. It was as warm as the carpet on the walls. Plague’s name, this Qeng Ho wallpaper was good. Even looking off to the side, there was no distortion. He chuckled softly. In the end, running the Peddler side of the Exile might be the easiest thing.They had some experience with the duty schedule that Nau proposed.

But for himself… Nau allowed a moment of self-pity. Someone trustable and competent must stay on Watch till final recovery. There was only one such person, and his name was Tomas Nau. On his own, Ritser Brughel would foolishly kill resources that could not be spared—or do his best to kill Nau himself. On her own, Anne Reynolt could be trusted for years, but if something unexpected came up… Well, the Qeng Ho seemed thoroughly subdued, and after the interrogations, Nau was relatively sure that no big secrets remained. But if the Qeng Ho did again conspire, Anne Reynolt would be lost.

So Tomas Nau might be a hundred years old before he saw triumph here. That was middle-aged by Balacrean standards. Nau sighed. So be it. Qeng Ho medicine would more than make up for the time lost. And then—

The room shivered, a nearly inaudible groaning sound. Where Nau’s hand touched the wall, the vibration crept in along his bones. It was the third rock quake in the last 40Ksec.

On the far side of the room, the Peddler girl stirred in their bed. “Wha—?” Qiwi Lin Lisolet emerged from sleep, her motion lifting her out of the bed. She had been working for nearly three days straight, trying yet again to find a stable configuration for the rockpile. Lisolet’s gaze wobbled about. She probably didn’t even know what had wakened her. Her eyes fixed on Nau standing by the window, and a sympathetic smile spread across her face. “Oh, Tomas, you’re losing more sleep worrying about us?”

She reached out her arms, a comforting. Nau smiled shyly and nodded. Hell, what she said was even approximately true. He floated across the room, stopped himself with one hand against the wall behind her head. She wrapped her arms around him and they floated, slowly sinking, toward the bed below. He slid his arms toward her waist, felt her strong legs bend around his. “You’re doing everything you can, Tomas. Don’t try to do more. Things will be all right.” Her hands brushed gently against the hair at the back of his neck, and he felt the trembling in her. It was Qiwi Lisolet who worried, who would work herself to death if she thought it would add one percent to their overall chances of survival. They drifted silent for long seconds, till gravity drew them down to the froth of lace that was their bed.

Nau let his hands roam her flanks; he felt the worry slowly subside in her. Lots had gone wrong with this mission, but Qiwi Lin Lisolet could be counted as a small triumph. She had been fourteen—precocious, naive, willful—when Nau took down the Qeng Ho fleet. The girl was properly infected with mindrot. She could have been Focused; for a while he had considered making her his body toy.Thank the Plague I didn’t.

During the first couple of years, the girl had spent much of her time in this room, crying. Diem’s “murder” of her mother had made her the first wholehearted turncoat. Nau had spent Msecs comforting her. At first that had been simply an exercise in the persuasive arts, with the possible side effect that Qiwi might improve his credibility with the other Peddlers. But as time passed, Nau came to see that the girl was more dangerous and more useful than he had guessed. Qiwi had lived much of her childhood on-Watch during the voyage from Triland. She had used the time with almost Focused intensity, learning construction engineering, life-support technology, and trading practices. It was weird; why was one child given such special treatment? Like so many of the Qeng Ho factions, the Lisolet Family had its own secrets, its own interior culture. During the interrogations, he had squeezed the probable explanation out of the girl’s mother. The Lisolets used the time between the stars to mold those girl children who were intended for ruling positions in the Family. If things had gone according to Kira Pen Lisolet’s plans, the girl would have been ready for further instruction here in-system, totally dominated by her loyalty toward her mother.

As things turned out, this made the girl ideal for Tomas Nau’s purposes. She was young and talented, and desperately in need of someone in whom to invest her loyalty. He could run her Watch after Watch without coldsleep, just as he had to run himself. She would be a good companion for the time ahead—and one who was a constant test of his plans. Qiwi was smart and in many ways her personality was still very independent. Even now, with the evidence of what really happened to her mother and the others safely blown away, slipups could happen. Using Qiwi was a thrill ride, a constant test of his nerve. But at least he understood the danger now, and had taken precautions.

“Tomas—” She turned to face him directly. “Do you think I’ll ever get the rockpile stabilized?”

Indeed, that was a proper thing for her to worry about. Ritser Brughel—or even a younger Tomas Nau—would not have realized that the correct response was not a threat or even disapproval. “Yes, you’ll think of something. We’ll think of something. Take a few days’ vacation, okay? Old Trinli is off coldsleep this Watch. Let him balance the rockpile for a while.”

Qiwi’s laughter made her sound even younger than she looked. “Oh, yes. Pham Trinli!” He was the only one of Diem’s conspirators she had more contempt than anger for. “Remember the last time he ran the balance? He talks loud, but he started out so timid. Before he knew it, the rockpile was three meters per second off L1 track. Then he overreacted and—” She started laughing again. The strangest things made this Peddler girl laugh. It was one of the puzzles about her that still intrigued him.

Lisolet was silent for a moment, and when she finally spoke, she surprised the Podmaster. “Yeah… maybe you’re right. If it’s just four days, I can set things up so even Trinli can’t do too much damage. I do need to step back, think about things. Maybe we can water-weld the blocks after all…. Besides, Papa is awake on this Watch. I’d like to be with him a little more.” She looked at him questioningly, implicitly asking for release from duty.

Hunh.Sometimes the manipulation didn’t work out as expected. He’d have bet three zipheads she wouldn’t take him up on the offer.I could stillturn her back. He could agree with just enough reluctance to make her ashamed. No. It wasn’t worth it, not this time.And if one does not forbid,then be wholeheartedly generous in giving permission. He gathered her close. “Yes! Even you have to learn to relax.”

She sighed, smiled with a hint of mischievousness. “Oh, yes, but I’ve already learned that.” She reached down, and neither of them spoke for some time. Qiwi Lisolet was still a clumsy teenager, but she was learning. And Tomas Nau had years to teach her. Kira Pen Lisolet had not had nearly so much time, and had been a resisting adult. Nau smiled, remembering. Oh yes. In different ways, both mother and daughter had served him well.

Ali Lin had not been born into the Lisolet Family. He had been Kira Pen Lisolet’s external acquisition. Ali was one in a trillion, a genius when it came to parks and living things. And he was Qiwi’s father. Both Kira and Qiwi had loved him very much, even if he could never be what Kira was and what Qiwi would one day be.

Ali Lin was important to the Emergents, probably as important as any of the Focused. He was one of the few who had a lab outside the attic warrens of Hammerfest. He was one of the few who did not have Anne Reynolt or one of the lesser managers constantly watching out for him.

Now he and Qiwi sat in the treetops of the Qeng Ho park, playing a slow, patient game with the bugs. She had been here 10Ksec, and Papa some time more. He had her doing DNA diffs on the new strains of garbage spiders he’d been breeding. Even now, he seemed to trust her with that work, only checking her results every Ksec or so. The rest of the time he was lost in his examination of the leaves and a sort of daydreaming contemplation of how he might do the projects that Anne Reynolt had set for him.

Qiwi looked down past her feet, at the floor of the park. The trees were flowering a mandors, bred for microgravity over thousands of years by people like Ali Lin. The leaves twisted down and down, bushing out so that their eyrie was almost invisible from the shadowed “below.” Even without gravity, the blue sky and the turn of the branches gave a subtle orientation to the park. The largest real animals were the butterflies and the bees. She could hear the bees, see an occasional erratic bullet of their flight. The butterflies were everywhere. The micro-gee varieties oriented on the false sunlight, so their flight provided the visitor with one more psychological cue about up and down. Right now the park was empty of other humans, officially closed for maintenance. That was something of a fib, but Tomas Nau had not called her on it. In fact, the park had just become too popular. The Emergents loved it at least as much as the Qeng Ho. The place was so popular that Qiwi could detect the beginnings of system failure; the little garbage spiders weren’t quite keeping up anymore.

She looked at her father’s abstracted features and smiled. This really was maintenance time, of a sort. “Here’s the latest set of diffs; is this what you’re looking for, Papa?”

“Hmm?” The other didn’t look up from his work. Then abruptly he seemed to hear. “Really? Let’s see, Qiwi.”

She slid the list across to him. “See? Here and here. This is the pattern match we were looking for. The imaginal disks will change just the way you wanted.” Papa wanted a higher metabolism, without losing the population bounds. In this park, the insects did not have bacterial predators; the contest for life went on within their genomes.

Ali took the list from her hands. He smiled gently, almost looking at her, almost noticing her. “Good, you got the multiplier trick just right.”

Hearing such words was about as close as Qiwi Lin Lisolet could come to recapturing the past. Age nine to fourteen had been Qiwi’s Lisoletish learning time. It had been a lonely time, but Mom had been right about it. Qiwi had come a long way toward growing up, learning to be alone in the great dark. She had learned about the life-support systems that were her father’s specialty, learned the celestial mechanics that made all her mother’s constructions possible, and most of all she had learned how much she loved to be around others during their waking times. Both her parents had spent several of those years out of coldsleep, sharing maintenance duty with her and the Watch techs.

Now Mama was dead and Papa was Focused, his soul concentrated down upon one thing: the biological management of ecosystems. But within that Focus, he and she could still communicate. In the years since the ambush, they had been together for Msecs of common Watch. Qiwi had continued to learn from him. And sometimes, when they were deep within the complexity of species stability, sometimes it was like before, in childhood, when Papa would get so trapped in his passion for living things that he seemed to forget his daughter was really a person, and they were both swallowed up by wonders greater than themselves.

Qiwi studied the diffs—but mostly she was watching her father. She knew he was very close to finishing the garbage-spider project, his part of it anyway. Long experience told her that there would be a few moments after that when Ali Lin would be approachable, when his Focus cast about for something new to bind on. Qiwi smiled to herself.And I have the project. It was almost what Reynolt and Tomas wanted from Papa, so diverting him would be possible if she played it just right.

There.Ali Lin sighed, gazing contentedly on the branches and leaves around them. Qiwi had maybe fifty seconds. She slipped downward from her branch, holding her position with the tip of her foot. She snagged the bonsai bubble she had smuggled in, and returned to her father. “Remember these, Papa? Really, really small parks?”

Papa didn’t ignore her words. He turned toward her as quickly as a normal person, and his eyes widened when he caught sight of the clear plastic sphere. “Yes! Except for light, a completely closed ecology.”

Qiwi floated the empty bubble into his hands. Bonsai bubbles were a commonplace in the confines of a ramscoop under way. They existed in all levels of sophistication, from lumps of moss up to things almost as complex as this temp’s park. And— “This is a little smaller than the problems we’ve been working on. I’m not sure your solutions would work here.”

Appeals to pride had often worked on the old Ali, almost as often as appeals to love. Now you had to catch Papa at just the right instant. He squinted at the bubble, seemed to feel the dimensions with his hands. “No, no! I can do it. My new tricks are very powerful…. Would you like a little lake, maybe lipid bound to lie flat?”

Qiwi nodded.

“And those garbage spiders, I can make them smaller and give them colored wings.”

“Yes.” Reynolt would let him spend more effort on the garbage bugs. They were important for more than just the central park. So much had been destroyed in the fighting. Ali’s work would allow small-scale life-support modules all through the surviving structures. It was something that would normally take a Qeng Ho specialist team and deep searches of the fleet’s databases—but Papa was both Focused and a genius. He could do such design work all by himself, and in just a few Msecs.

Papa just needed a push in the right conceptual direction, something that old prune, Anne Reynolt, could rarely provide. So—

Ali Lin was suddenly grinning from ear to ear. “I bet I can top the Namqem High Treasures. Look, the filtration webs will carry straight across. The shrubs will be standard, maybe a little modified to support your insect diffs.”

“Yes, yes,” said Qiwi. They had a real conversation, several hundred seconds, before her father lapsed into the fierce concentration that would make the “simple changes” actually doable. The hardest part would be at the bacterial and mitochondrial level, and that was totally beyond Qiwi. She smiled at her father, almost reached out to touch his shoulder. Mama would be proud of them. Papa’s methods might even be new—they certainly weren’t in any of the obvious places in the historical dbs. Qiwi had guessed that they might allow somevery nice microparks, but this was more than she had hoped for.

The High Treasure bonsais were no bigger than this, thirty centimeters across. Some of them had lived for two hundred years, complete animal/ plant ecosystems—even supporting fake evolution. The method was proprietary and not even the Qeng Ho had been able to purchase all of it. Creating such things with only mission resources would be a miracle. If Papa could do better than that… hmm. Most people, even Tomas, seemed to think that Qiwi had been brought up to be an armsman, following her mother’s military career. They didn’t understand. The Lisolets were Qeng Ho. Fighting came a far second. Sure, she had learned a little about combat. Sure, Mama intended she spend a decade or two learning what to do When All Else Fails. But Trading was what everything came back to. Trading and making a profit. So they had been taken over by the Emergents. But Tomas was a decent person—and he had the hardest job she could imagine. She was doing everything she could to support him, to make what was left of their expeditions survive. Tomas couldn’t help that his culture was all screwed up.

And in the end it wouldn’t matter that Tomas didn’t understand. Qiwi smiled at the empty plastic sphere, imagining what it would be like filled with her father’s creation. In civilized places, a top bonsai might sell for the price of an entire starship. Here? Well, Qiwi might make these on the side. After all, it was a frivolity, something that Tomas probably couldn’t justify to himself. Tomas had banned hoarding and favor-trading. Uh-oh. Maybe I’ll have to work around him for a while. It was much easier to get permission afterward. In the end, she figured the Qeng Ho would change Tomas’s people far more than the reverse.

She was just starting a new diffs sequence when there was a ripping sound from below, the source hidden by the lower foliage. For a second, Qiwi didn’t recognize the sound.The floor access hatch. That was for construction only. Opening it would tear the moss layer. Damn.

Qiwi swung out from their little nest, and moved quietly downward, careful not to crack branches or cast a shadow on the bottom moss. Breaking in while the park was officially closed was only an annoyance—heck, it was the sort of thing she would do if she felt like it. But that floor hatch was not supposed to be opened. It spoiled the park’s illusion, and it damaged the turf. What sort of jackass would do something like that—especially considering how seriously Emergents took official rules and regulations?

Qiwi hovered just above the bottommost canopy of leaves. In a second the intruder would be in view, but she could already hear him. It was Ritser Brughel. The Vice-Podmaster proceeded across the moss, cursing and whacking at something in the bushes. The guy was a real sewer-mouth. Qiwi was an avid student of such language, and she had listened to him before. Brughel might be the number-two boss man of the Emergent expedition—but he was also a one-man proof that Emergent leaders could be bums. Tomas seemed to realize the fellow was a bad actor; he’d put the Vice Podmaster’s quarters off the rockpile, on the old Invisible Hand. And Brughel’s Watch schedule was the same as much of the regular crew. While poor Tomas aged year after year to keep the mission safe, Brughel was out of coldsleep only 10Msec in every 40. So Qiwi didn’t know him very well—but what she knew she loathed.If this jerk could be trusted to pull his ownweight, Tomas wouldn’t be burning his lifetime away for us. She listened in silence for a moment more.Neat stuff. But there was an undercurrent to it she didn’t hear in most folk’s obscenities, like the fellow meant what he was saying literally.

Qiwi pushed loudly between the branches, holding herself so that she stood half a meter in the air—about eye-to-eye with the Emergent. “The park is closed for maintenance, Podmaster.”

Brughel gave a tiny flinch of surprise. For a second he was silent, his pale pink skin darkening in the most comical way. “You insolent little… so what are you doing here?”

“I’m doing the maintenance.” Well, that was at least cousin to the truth. Now counterattack: “And what are you doing here?”

Brughel’s face got even darker. He pulled himself upward, his head ten centimeters above Qiwi’s. Now his feet floated on air, too. “Scum have no business questioning me.” He was carrying that silly steel baton. It was a plain metal dowel incised here and there with dark-stained dings. He braced himself with one hand and swung the baton through a glittering arc that splintered the sapling beside Qiwi’s head.

Now Qiwi was getting angry, too. She grabbed one of the lower branches, hoisted herself so that she and Brughel were eye-to-eye once more. “That’s vandalism, not an explanation.” She knew that Tomas had the park monitored—and vandalism was at least the crime for Emergents that it was for Qeng Ho.

The Podmaster was so angry that he had trouble talking. “You’re the vandals. This park was beautiful, more than I thought scum could ever make. But now you’re sabotaging it. I was in here yesterday—you’ve infected it with vermin.” He swung the metal dowel again, the blow dislodging a garbage web that was hidden in the branches. The web creatures floated off in all directions, silken glides streaming behind them. Brughel poked at the web, shaking beetle casings and dead leaves and miscellaneous detritus into a cloud around them. “See? What else are you poisoning?” He leaned close, looking down at her from above.

For a moment Qiwi just stared, uncomprehending. He couldn’t possibly mean what he was saying. How could anyone be so ignorant?But remember,he’s a Chump. She pulled herself high enough to look down at Brughel, and shouted into his face. “It’s a zero-gee park, for God’s sake! What do you think keeps the air clean of floating crap? The garbage bugs have always been here… though maybe they’re a little overworked just now.” She hadn’t meant it quite the way it came out, but now she looked the Podmaster up and down as though she had one particularly large piece of garbage in mind.

They were above the lower leaf canopies now. From the corner of her eye, Qiwi could see Papa. The sky was limitless blue, guarded by an occasional branch. She could feel the fake sunlight hot on the back of her head. If they played a few more rounds of one-up-one-up, they’d be banging their heads on plastic. Qiwi started laughing.

And now Brughel was silent, just staring at her. He slapped his steel baton into his palm again and again. There were rumors about those dark stains in the metal; it was obvious what Ritser Brughel wanted people to think they were. But the guy just didn’t carry himself like a fighter. And when he swung that baton, it was as though he had never considered the possibility that there might be targets that could fight back. Just now, his only hold-on was the toe of one boot hooked between branches. Qiwi braced herself unobtrusively and smiled her most insolent smile.

Brughel was motionless for a second. His gaze flicked to either side of her. And then without another word he pushed off, floundered for a moment, found a branch, and dived for the bottom-level hatch.

Qiwi floated silent, the strangest feelings chasing up her body, down her arms. For a moment she couldn’t identify them. But the park… how wonderful it was with Ritser Brughel gone! She could hear the little buzzing sounds and the butterflies, where a moment before all her attention had tunneled down on the Podmaster’s anger. And now she recognized the tingling in her arms, and the racing of her heart: rage and fear.

Qiwi Lin Lisolet had teased and enraged her share of people. It had been almost her hobby in pre-Flight. Mama said it was mind-hidden anger at the thought of being alone between the stars. Maybe. But it had also been fun. This was different.

She turned back toward her father’s nest in the trees. And plenty of people had been angry with her over the years. Back in innocent times, Ezr Vinh used to get near apoplectic. Poor Ezr, I wish… But this today had been different. She had seen the difference in Ritser Brughel’s eyes. The man had really wanted to kill her, had teetered on the edge of trying. And probably the only thing that stopped him was the thought that Tomas would know. But if Brughel could ever get her alone, unseen by the security monitors…

Qiwi’s hands were shaking by the time she reached Ali Lin. Papa. She wanted so much to be held, to have him soothe the shaking. Ali Lin wasn’t even looking at her. Papa had been Focused for several years now, but Qiwi could remember the times before so well. Before… Papa would have rushed out of the trees at the first sound of argument below. He would have put himself between Qiwi and Brughel, steel club or no. Now… Qiwi didn’t remember much of the last few moments except for Ritser Brughel. But there were fragments: Ali had sat unmoved among his displays and analytics. He had heard the argument, even glanced their way when the shouting became loud and close. His look had been impatient, a “don’t-distract-me” dismissal.

Qiwi reached out a still-shaking hand to touch his shoulder. He shrugged the way you might shoo off a pesky bug. In some ways Papa still lived, but in others he seemed more dead than Mama. Tomas said that Focus could be reversed. But Tomas needed Papa and the other Focused the way they were now. Besides, Tomas had been raised an Emergent. They used Focus to make people into property. They wereproud of doing so. Qiwi knew that there were plenty of Qeng Ho survivors who considered all the talk of “reversal of Focus” to be a lie. So far, not a single Focused person had been reversed.Tomas wouldn’t lie about something so important.

And maybe if she and Papa did well enough, she could get him back the sooner. For this wasn’t a death that went on forever. She slipped into her seat beside him and resumed looking at the new diffs. The processors had given her the beginning of results while she was off trading insults with Ritser Brughel.

Papa would be pleased.

Nau still met with the Fleet Management Committee every Msec or so. Of course, just who attended changed substantially from Watch to Watch. Ezr Vinh was present today; it would be very interesting to see the boy’s reaction to the surprise he had planned. And Ritser Brughel was attending, so he had asked Qiwi to stay away. Nau smiled to himself.Damn, I neverguessed how thoroughly she could humiliate the man.

Nau had combined the committee with his own Emergent staff meetings and called them “Watch-manager” meetings. The point was always that whatever their old differences, they were all in this together now and survival could only come through cooperation. The meetings were not as meaningful as Nau’s private consults with Anne Reynolt or his work with Ritser and the security people.Those often occurred between the regular Watches. Still, it wasn’t a lie to say that important work was done at these per-Msec meetings. Nau flicked his hand at the agenda. “So. Our last item: Anne Reynolt’s expedition to the sun. Anne?”

Anne didn’t smile as she corrected him. “The astrophysicists’ report, Podmaster. But first, I have a complaint. We need at least one unFocused specialist in this area. You know how hard it is to judge technical results….”

Nau sighed. She had been after him about this in private, too. “Anne, we don’t have the resources. We have just three surviving specialists in this area.” And they were all zipheads.

“I still need a reviewer with common sense.” She shrugged. “Very well. Per your direction, we have run two of the astrophysicists on a continuous Watch since before the Relight. Keep in mind, they’ve had five years to think about this report.” Reynolt waved at the air, and they were looking out on a modified Qeng Ho taxi. Auxiliary fuel tanks were strapped on every side, and the front was a forest of sensor gear. A silver shield-sail was propped on a rickety framework from one side of the craft. “Right before the Relight, Doctors Li and Wen flew this vehicle into low orbit around OnOff.” A second window showed the descent path, and a final orbit scarcely five hundred kilometers above the surface of the OnOff star. “By keeping the sail properly oriented, they safely flew at that altitude for more than a day.”

Actually it was Jau Xin’s pilot-zipheads who had done the flying. Nau nodded at Xin. “That was good work, Pilot Manager.”

Xin grinned. “Thank you, sir. Something to tell my children about.”

Reynolt ignored the comment. She popped up multiple windows, showing low-altitude views in various spectral regimes. “We’ve had a hard time with the analysis right from the beginning.”

They could hear the recorded voices of the two zipheads now. Li was Emergent-bred, but the other voice spoke in a Qeng Ho dialect. That must be Wen: “We’ve always known OnOff has the mass and density of a normal G star. Now we can make high-resolution maps of the interior temperatures and dens—” Dr. Li butted in with the typical urgency of a ziphead, “—but we need more microsats…. Resources be damned. We need two hundred at least, right through the time of Relighting.”

Reynolt paused the audio. “We got them one hundred microsats.” More windows popped up, Li and Wen back at Hammerfest after the Relight, arguing and arguing. Reynolt’s reports were often like this, a barrage of pictures and tables and sound bites.

Wen was talking again. He sounded tired. “Even in Off-state, the central densities were typical of a G star, yet there was no collapse. The surface turbulence is barely ten thousand kilometers deep. How? How? How?”

Li: “And after Relight, the deep internal structure looks still the same.”

“We can’t know for sure; we can’t get close.”

“No, it looks perfectly typical now. We have models….”

Wen’s voice changed again. He was speaking faster, in a tone of frustration, almost pain. “All this data, and we have just the same mysteries as before. I’ve spent five years now studying reaction paths, and I’m as clueless as the Dawn Age astronomers. Therehas to be something going on in the extended core, or else there would be a collapse.”

The other ziphead sounded petulant. “Obviously, even in Off state the star is still radiating, but radiating something that converts to low-interaction.”

“But what? What? And if there could be such a thing, why don’t the higher layers collapse?”

“Cuz the conversion is at the base of the photosphere, and thatis collapsed! Ryop. I’m using your own modeling software to show this!”

“No. Post hoc nonsense, no better than ages past.”

“But I’ve gotdata !”

“So? Your adiabats are—”

Reynolt cut the audio. “They went on like this for many days. Most of it is a private jargon, the sort of things a close-bound Focused pair often invents.”

Nau straightened in his chair. “If they can only talk to each other, we have no access. Did you lose them?”

“No. At least not in the usual way. Dr. Wen became so frustrated that he began to consider random externalities. In a normal person that might lead to creativity but—”

Brughel laughed, genuinely amused. “So your astronomer laddie lost sight of the ball, eh, Reynolt?”

Reynolt didn’t even look at Brughel. “Be silent,” she said. Nau noticed the Peddlers’ startlement at her words. Ritser was second-in-command, the obvious sadist among the rulers—and here she had abruptly put him down.I wonder when the Peddlers will figure it out. A scowl passed briefly across Brughel’s features. Then his grin broadened. He settled back in his chair and flicked an amused glance in Nau’s direction. Anne continued without missing a beat: “Wen backed off from the problem, setting it in a wider and wider context. At first, there was some relevance.”

Wen’s voice resumed, the same rushed monotone as before. “OnOff’s galactic orbit. A clue.” The presumptive graph of OnOff’s galactic orbit—assuming no close stellar encounters—flashed in a window. Anne was dredging from the fellow’s notebooks. The plot extended back over half a billion years. It was the typical flower-petal figure of a halo-population star: Once every two hundred million years, OnOff penetrated the hidden heart of the galaxy. From there, it swung out and out till the stars spread thin and the intergalactic dark began. Tomas Nau was no astronomer, but he knew that halo-pop stars don’t have usable planetary systems, and as a result aren’t often visited. But surely that was the least of the strangeness of OnOff.

Somehow the Qeng Ho ziphead had become totally fixated on the star’s galactic orbit. “This thing—it can’t be a star—has seen the Heart of All. Again and again and again—” Reynolt skipped through what must have been a long, trapped loop in poor Wen’s thinking. The ziphead’s voice was momentarily calmer: “Clues. There are lots of clues, really. Forget the physics; just consider the light curve. For two hundred and fifteen years out of two hundred and fifty, it radiates less perceptible energy than a brown dwarf.” The windows accompanying Wen’s thoughts flickered from idea to idea, pictures of brown dwarfs, the much more rapid oscillations that the physicists had extrapolated for OnOff’s distant past. “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 squarewave generator once. That’s it! Magic from the heart of the galaxy, broken now so that we can’t understand it.”

The audio abruptly ended, and Wen’s kaleidoscope of windows was fixed in mid-frenzy. “Dr. Wen has been thoroughly trapped in this cycle of ideas for ten Msec,” said Reynolt.

Nau already knew where this was going, but he put on a concerned look anyway. “What are we left with?”

“Dr. Li is doing okay. He was slipping into his own contrarian cycle till we separated him from Wen. But now—well, he’s fixated on the Qeng Ho system identification software. He has an enormously complex model that matches all the observations.” More pictures, Li’s theory of a new family of subatomic particles. “Dr. Li is spreading into the cognitive territory that Hunte Wen monopolized, but he’s getting very different results.”

Li’s voice: “Yes. Yes! My model predicts stars like this must be common very near the galaxy’s hole. Very very rarely, they interact, a strongly coupled explosion. The result gets kicked high out of the core.” Of course, Li’s trajectory was identical to Wen’s after the presumed explosion. “I can fit all the parameters. We can’t see blinking stars in the dust of the core; they’re not bright and they’re very high-rate. But once in a billion years we get this asymmetrical destruction, and an ejection.” Pictures of the hypothetical explosion of OnOff’s hypothetical destroyer. Pictures of OnOff’s original solar system blown away—all except a tiny protected shadow on the far side of OnOff from the destroyer.

Ezr Vinh leaned forward. “Lord, he’s explained just about everything.”

“Yes,” said Nau. “Even the singleton nature of the planetary system.” He turned away from the jumble of windows, and looked at Anne. “So what do you think?”

Reynolt shrugged. “Who knows? That’s why we need an unFocused specialist, Podmaster. Dr. Li is spreading his net wider and wider. That can be a symptom of a classic, explain-everything trap. And his particle theory is large; it may be a Shannon tautology.” She paused. Anne Reynolt was totally incapable of showmanship. Nau had arranged his questions so her bombshell came out last: “That particle theory is in his central specialty, however. And it has consequences, perhaps a faster ramscoop drive.”

No one said anything for several seconds. The Qeng Ho had been diddling their drives for thousands of years, since before Pham Nuwen even. They had stolen insights from hundreds of civilizations. In the last thousand years, they’d made less than a one-percent improvement. “Well, well, well.” Tomas Nau knew how good it felt to gamble big… and win. Even the Peddlers were grinning like idiots. He let the good feeling pass back and forth around the room. It was veryvery good news, even if the payoff was at the end of the Exile. “This does make our astrophysicists a precious commodity. Can you do anything about Wen?”

“Hunte Wen is not recoverable, I’m afraid.” She opened a window on medical imagery. To a Qeng Ho physician it might have looked like a simple brain diagnostic. To Anne Reynolt, it was a strategy map. “See, the connectivity here and here is associated with his work on OnOff; I’ve demonstrated that by detuning some of it. If we try to back him out of his fixation, we’ll wipe his work of the last five years—as well as cross connections into much of his general expertise. Remember. Focus surgery is mainly grope and peek, with resolution not much better than a millimeter.”

“So we’d end up with a vegetable?”

“No. If we back out and undo the Focus, he’ll have the personality and most of the memories of before. He just won’t be much of a physicist anymore.”

“Hmm,” said Nau, considering. So they couldn’t just deFocus the Peddler and have the outside expert Reynolt needed.And I’ll be damned if I’ll risk deFocusing the third fellow. Yet there was a very tidy solution, that still made good use of all three men. “Okay, Anne. Here is what I propose. Bring the other physicist online, but on a low duty cycle. Keep Dr. Li in the freezer while the new fellow reviews Li’s results. This won’t be as good as an unFocused review, but if you do it cleverly the results should be pretty unbiased.”

Another shrug. Reynolt had no false modesty, but she also didn’t realize how very good she was.

“As for Hunte Wen,” Nau continued. “He’s done his best for us, and we can’t ask for more.” Literally so, according to Anne. “I want you to deFocus him.”

Ezr Vinh was staring, openmouthed. The other Peddlers looked almost as shocked. There was a small risk here; Hunte Wen would not be the best proof that Focus could be reversed. On the other hand, he was obviously a hardship case.Show your concern: “We’ve run Dr. Wen for more than five years straight, and I see he is already middle-aged. Use whatever medical consumables it takes to give him the best health possible.”

It was the final agenda item, and the meeting didn’t continue for long after that. Nau watched as everyone floated out, jabbering to one another their enthusiasm about Li’s discovery and Wen’s manumission. Ezr Vinh left last, but he wasn’t talking to anyone. The boy had a glassy look about him.Yes, Mr. Vinh. Be good, and maybe someday I’ll free the one you careabout.

SIXTEEN

Things got very quiet during the Tween Watch. Most Watches were multiples of an Msec, with overlap so people could brief the new Watch on current problems. The Tween was no secret, but Nau officially treated it as a glitch in the scheduling program, a four-day gap that appeared between Watches every so often. In fact, it was like the missing seventh floor, or that mythical magic day that comes between Oneday and Twoday.

“Say, wouldn’t it be great to have Tween Watches back home?” Brughel joked as he led Nau and Kal Omo into the corpsicle stacks. “I did security at Frenk for five years—it sure would have been easier if I could have declared time out every so often, and rearranged the game to suit my needs.” His voice sounded loud in the hold, the echoes coming back from several directions. In fact, they were the only ones awake aboard the Suivire. Down on Hammerfest, there was Reynolt and a contingent of waking zipheads. A skeleton crew of Emergents and Peddlers—including Qiwi Lisolet—were working the stabilization jets on the rockpile. But, zipheads aside, only nine people knew the hardest secrets. And here between Watches, they could do all that was necessary to protect the pod.

The interior walls of the Suivire’s coldsleep hold had been knocked out, and dozens of additional coffins installed. All of Watch A slept here, almost seven hundred people. Watch trees B and Misc were on the Brisgo Gap, while C and D were aboard the Common Good. But it was A’s Watch that began after this Tween time.

A red light appeared on the wall; the hold’s stand-alone data system was ready to talk. Nau put on his huds, and suddenly the caskets were labeled by name and affiliation. Everything looked green.Thank goodness. Nau turned to his podsergeant. Kal Omo’s name, status, and vital signs floated in the air beside his face; the data system took its duties very literally. “Anne’s medical people will be here in a few thousand seconds, Kal. Don’t let them in till Ritser and I are finished.”

“Yes, sir.” There was a faint smile on the man’s face as he turned and coasted out the door. Kal Omo had been through this before; he’d helped create the hoax aboard theFar Treasure. He knew what to expect.

And then he and Ritser Brughel were alone. “Okay, have you found any more bad apples, Ritser?”

Ritser was grinning; he had some surprise planned. They drifted past racks of coffins, the room light shining up from beneath their feet. The coffins had been through hell, yet they still worked reliably—the Qeng Ho ones, anyway. The Peddlers were clever; they broadcast technology throughout Human Space—yet their own goods were better than what they shouted free to the stars.But now we have a fleet library… and people tomake sense of it.

“I’ve been running my snoops hard, Podmaster. Watch A is pretty clean, though—” He paused and stopped his coast with a hand against the rack. The slender railings flexed along the length of the rack; this really was an ad hoc setup. “—though I don’t know why you put up with seditious deadwood like this.” He tapped one of the coffins with his podmaster’s baton.

The Peddler coffins had wide, curved windows, and an internal light. Even without the display label, Nau would have recognized Pham Trinli. Somehow, the guy looked younger when his face was inanimate.

Ritser must have taken his silence for indecision. “He knew about Diem’s plot.”

Nau shrugged. “Of course. So did Vinh. So did a few others. And now they’re known quantities.”

“But—”

“Remember, Ritser, we agreed. We can’t afford any more casual wet-work.” His biggest mistake of this whole adventure had been in the field interrogations after the ambush. Nau had followed the disaster-management strategies of the Plague Time, the hard strategies that were shrouded from the view of ordinary citizens. But the First Podmasters had been in a very different situation; they’d had plenty of human resources. In this situation… well, for the Qeng Ho who could be Focused, interrogation was no problem. But the others were amazingly tough. Worst of all, they didn’t respond to threats in a rational way. Ritser had gotten a little crazy, and Tomas hadn’t been far behind. They had killed the last of the senior Peddlers before they really understood the other side’s psychology. All in all, it had been quite a debacle, but it had also been a maturing experience. Tomas had learned how to deal with the survivors.

Ritser smiled. “Okay. At least he’s good for comic relief. The way he tries to suck up to you and me—and pompous at the same time!” He waved at the racked corpsicles. “Sure. Wake ’em all per schedule. We’ve had to explain too many ‘accidents’ as it is.” He turned back toward Nau. He still wore a smile, but the bottom light made it look like the grimace it really was. “The real problem isn’t with Watch A. Podmaster, in the last four days, I’ve discovered clear subversion elsewhere.”

Nau stared at him with an expression of mild surprise. This was what he’d been waiting for. “Qiwi Lisolet?”

“Yes! Wait, I know you saw the face-off I had with her the other day. The pus-sucker deserves to die for that—but that’s not my complaint to you. I have solid evidence she’s breaking Your Law. And she is in league with others.”

Nau actually was a bit surprised by this. “In what way?”

“You know I caught her in the Peddlers’ park with her father. She had shut the park down on her own whim. That’s what made me so angry. But afterwards… I put my snoops on her. Random monitoring might not have noticed it for several more Watches: the little slut is diverting the pod’s resources. She’s stolen output from the volatiles distillery. She’s embezzled time from the factory. She’s diverted her father’s Focus to help her with private ventures.”

Pestilence. This was more than Qiwi had told him about. “So… what is she doing with these resources?”

“These resources and others, Podmaster. She has a variety of plans. And she is not alone…. She intends to barter these stolen goods for her own advancement.”

For a moment, Nau couldn’t think of what to say. Of course, bartering community resources was a crime. During most of the Plague Years, more people had been executed for barter and hoarding than had died of the Plague itself. But in modern times… well, barter could never be totally eliminated. On Balacrea, it was periodically the excuse for major exterminations—but only that, an excuse. “Ritser.” Nau spoke carefully, lying: “I knew about all these activities. Certainly they are against the letter of My Law. But consider. We are twenty light-years from home. We are dealing with the Qeng Ho. They reallyare peddlers. I know it is hard to accept, but their whole existence revolves around cheating the community. We cannot hope to suppress that in an instant—”

“No!” Brughel pushed off the rack he had been holding, grabbed the railing next to Tomas. “They are all scum, but it is only Lisolet and a few aggravant conspirators—and I can tell you just who they are—who are violating Your Law!”

Nau could imagine how all this happened. Qiwi Lin Lisolet had never obeyed rules, even among the Qeng Ho. Her crazy mother had set her up to be manipulated, but even so the girl was beyond direct control. More that anything, she loved to play. Qiwi had once said to him, “It’s always easier to get forgiveness than to get permission.” As much as anything, that simple claim showed the gulf that separated Qiwi’s worldview from the ‘First Podmasters’.

It took an effort of will not to retreat before Brughel’s advance.

What’s gotten into him?He looked straight into the other’s eyes, ignoring the baton in Ritser’s twitching hand. “I’m sure you could identify them. That’s your job, Vice-Podmaster. And part of my job is to interpret My Law. You know that Qiwi never shook off the mindrot; if necessary, she can be easily… curbed. I want you to keep me informed of these possible infractions, but for now I choose to wink at them.”

“You choose to wink at them? Youchoose ? I—” Brughel was wordless for a second. When he continued, his voice was more controlled, a metered rage. “Yes, we’re twenty light-years from home. We’re twenty light-years from your family. And your uncle doesn’t rule anymore.” The word of Alan Nau’s assassination had arrived while their expedition was still three years out of the OnOff system. “At home maybe you could break any rule, protect lawbreakers simply because they were a good lay.” He slapped his baton gently against his palm. “Out here, and right now, you’re very alone.”

Lethal force between Podmasters was beyond any law. That was a principle dating back to the Plague Years—but it was also a basic truth of nature. If Brughel were to smash his skull now, Kal Omo would follow the Vice-Podmaster. But Nau just spoke quietly. “You are even more alone, my friend. How many of the Focused are imprinted on you?”

“I—I have Xin’s pilots, I have the snoops. I could make Reynolt redirect whatever else I need.”

Ritser was teetering at the edge of an abyss that Tomas hadn’t noticed before, but at least he was calming down. “I think you understand Anne better than that, Ritser.”

And abruptly the killing flame in Brughel was quenched. “Yeah, you’re right. You’re right.” He seemed to crumple. “Sir… it’s just that this mission has turned out so different from what I imagined. We had the resources to live like High Podmasters here. We had the prospect of finding a treasure world. Now most of our zipheads are dead. We don’t have the equipment for a safe return. We’re stuck here for decades….”

Ritser seemed on the verge of tears. The passage from threat to weakness was fascinating. Tomas spoke quietly, his tone comforting. “I understand, Ritser. We are in a more extreme situation than anyone has been in since the Plagues. If this is painful to one as strong as you, I am very afraid for ordinary crew of the mission.” All true, though most of the crew had much less remarkable personalities than Ritser Brughel. Like Ritser, they were caught in a decades-long cul-de-sac in which family and children-raising were not an option. That was a dangerous problem, one that he must not overlook. But most of the ordinary folk would have no trouble continuing relationships, finding new ones; there were almost a thousand unFocused people here. Ritser’s drives would be harder to satisfy. Ritser used people up, and now there were scarcely any left for him.

“But there is still the prospect of treasure—perhaps all that we hoped for. Taking the Qeng Ho nearly cost us our lives, but now we are learning their secrets. And you were at the last Watch-manager meeting: we’ve discovered physics that is new even to the Qeng Ho. The best is yet to come, Ritser. The Spiders are primitive now, but life could scarcely have originated here; this solar system is just too extreme. We aren’t the first species that has come snooping. Imagine, Ritser: a nonhuman, starfaring civilization. Its secrets are down there, somewhere in the ruins of their past.”

He guided his Vice-Podmaster around the far end of the coffin racks, and they started back along the second aisle. The head-up display reported green everywhere, though as usual the Emergent coffins were showing high wear. Sigh. In a few years, they might not have enough usable coffins to maintain a comfortable Watch schedule. By itself, a star fleet could not build another fleet, or even keep itself indefinitely provisioned with hightech supplies. It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilization—a civilization with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry. There were no shortcuts; Humankind had often imagined, but never created, a general assembler.

Ritser seemed calmer now, his desperate anger replaced by thought. “…Okay. We sacrifice a lot, but in the end we go home winners. I can gut it out as well as any. But still… why should it take so pus long? We should land squat on some Spider kingdom and take over—”

“They’ve just reinvented electronics, Ritser. We need more—”

The Vice-Podmaster shook his head impatiently. “Yes, yes. Of course. We need a solid industrial base. I probably know that better than you; I was Podmaster at the Lorbita Shipyards. Nothing short of a major rebuild is going to save our ass. But there’s still no reason for hiding here at L1. If we take over some Spider nation—maybe just pretend to ally with it—we could speed things up.”

“True, but the real problem is maintaining control. For that, timing is everything. You know I was in on the conquest of Gaspr. The early post-conquest, actually; if I’d been with the first fleet, I’d own millions now.” Nau didn’t keep the envy from his voice; it was a vision that Brughel would understand. Gaspr had been a jackpot. “Lord, what that first fleet did. It was just two ships, Ritser! Imagine. They had only five hundred zipheads—fewer than we have. But they sat and lurked and when Gaspr reattained the Information Age, they controlled every data system on the planet. The treasure just fell into their hands!” Nau shook his head, dismissing the vision. “Yes. We could try to take the Spiders now. It might speed things up. But it would be largely bluff on our part, against aliens that we don’t understand. If we miscalculated, if we got into a guerrilla war, we could piss away everything very quickly…. We’d probably ‘win,’ but a thirty-year wait might become five hundred. There’s precedent for that sort of failure, Ritser, though it doesn’t come from our Plague Time. Do you know the story of Canberra?”

Brughel shrugged. Canberra might be the most powerful civilization in Human Space, but it was too far away to interest him. Like many Emergents, Brughel’s interest in the wider universe was minimal.

“Three thousand years ago, Canberra was medieval. Like Gaspr, the original colony had bombed itself into total savagery, except that the Canberrans weren’t even halfway back. A small Qeng Ho fleet voyaged there; through some crazy mistake, they thought the Canberrans still had a profitable civilization. That was the Peddlers’ first big mistake. The second was in hanging around; they tried to trade with the Canberrans as they were. The Qeng Ho had all the power, they could make the primitive societies of Canberra do whatever they wanted.”

Brughel grunted. “I see where this is going. But the locals sound a lot more primitive than what we have here.”

“Yes, but they were human. And the Qeng Ho had much better resources. Anyway, they made their alliances. They pushed the local technology as hard as they could. They set out to conquer the world. And actually, they succeeded. But every step ground them down. The original crew lived their old age in stone castles. They didn’t even have coldsleep anymore. The hybrid civilization of Peddlers and locals eventually became very advanced and powerful—but that was too late for the originals.”

The Podmaster and his Vice were almost back to the main entrance. Brughel floated ahead, turning slowly so that he touched the wall like a deck, feet first. He looked up at the approaching Nau with an intent expression.

Nau touched down, let the grabfelt in his boots stop his rebound. “Think about what I’ve said, Ritser. Our Exile here is really necessary, and the payoff is as great as you ever imagined. In the meantime, let’s work on what’s bothering you. A Podmaster should not have to suffer.”

The look on the younger man’s face was surprised and grateful. “Ththank you, sir. A little help now and then is all I need.” They talked a few moments more, setting up the necessary compromises.

Coming back from theSuivire, Tomas had some time to think. From his taxi, the rockpile was a glittering jumble ahead of him, the sky around it speckled with the irregular shapes of the temps and warehouses and starships that orbited the pile. Here at Tween Watch he saw no evidence of human movement. Even Qiwi’s crews were out of sight, probably on the shade side of the pile. Far beyond the diamond mountains, Arachna floated in glorious isolation. Its great ocean showed patches of cloudlessness today. The tropical convergence zone was clear against the blue. More and more, the Spider world was looking like archetype Mother Earth, the one-in-a-thousand world where humans could land and thrive. It would continue to look like paradise for another thirty years or so—till once more its sun guttered out.And by then we will own it.

Just now, he had made that ultimate success a little more likely. He had solved a mystery and defused an unnecessary risk. Tomas’s mouth twisted in an unhappy smile. Ritser was quite wrong to think that being Alan Nau’s first nephew waseasy. True, Alan Nau had favored Tomas. It was clear from the beginning that Tomas would continue the Nau dominance of the Emergency. That was part of the problem, for it made Tomas a great threat to the elder Nau. Succession—even within Podmaster families—was most often by assassination. Yet Alan Nau had been clever. He did want his nephew to carry on the line—but only after Alan had lived and ruled as long as natural life would sustain him. Giving Tomas Nau command of the expedition to the OnOff star was a piece of statecraft that saved both ruler and heir apparent. Tomas Nau would be off the world stage for more than a two centuries. When he returned, it could well be with the resources to continue the Nau family’s rule.

Tomas had often wondered if Ritser Brughel might be a subtle kind of sabotage. Back home, the fellow had seemed a good choice for Vice-Podmaster. He was young, and he’d done a solid job cleaning up the Lorbita Shipyards. He was of Frenkisch stock; his parents had been two of the first supporters of Alan Nau’s invasion. As much as possible, the Emergency tried to transform each new conquest with the same stresses that the Plague Time had wrought upon Balacrea: the megadeaths, the mindrot, the establishment of the Podmaster class. Young Ritser had adapted to every demand of the new order.

But since they began this Exile, he’d been a pus-be-damned screwup: careless, slovenly, almost insolent. Part of that was his assigned role as Heavy, but Ritser wasn’t acting. He had become closed and uncooperative. There was the obvious conclusion: The Nau family’s enemies were clever, long-planning people. Maybe, somehow, they had slipped a ringer past Uncle Alan’s security.

Today, the mystery and the suspicions had collided.And I find notsabotage, nor even incompetence. His Vice-Podmaster simply had certain frustrated needs, and had been too proud to talk about them. Back in civilization, satisfying those needs would have been easy; such was a normal, if unpublicized, part of every Podmaster’s birthright. Here in the wilderness, all but shipwrecked… here Ritser faced some real hardship.

The taxi ghosted over the topmost spires of Hammerfest, and settled into the shadows below.

Satisfying Brughel would be difficult; the younger man would have to show some real restraint. Tomas was already reviewing the crew and ziphead rosters.Yes, I can make this work. And it would be worth it. Ritser Brughel was the only other Podmaster within twenty light-years. The Podmaster class was often deadly within itself, but there was a bond among them. Every one of them knew the hidden, hard strategies. Every one of them understood the true virtues of the Emergency. Ritser was young, still growing into himself. If the proper relationship could be established, other problems would be more tractable.

And their ultimate success might be even greater than what he told Ritser. It could be greater than Uncle Alan had imagined. It was a vision that might have eluded Tomas himself, if not for this firsthand meeting with the Peddlers.

Uncle Alan had had a respect for far threats; he had continued the Balacrean traditions of emission security. But even Uncle Alan never seemed to realize that they were playing tyrant over a laughably tiny pond: Balacrea, Frenk, Gaspr. Nau had just told Ritser Brughel about the founding of Canberra. There were better examples he could have used, but Canberra was a favorite of Tomas Nau’s. While his peers studied Emergency history to death, and added trivial nuances to the strategies, Tomas Nau studied the histories of Human Space. Even a disaster like the Plague Time was a commonplace in the larger scheme of things. The conquerors in the histories dwarfed the Balacrean stage. So Tomas Nau was familiar with a thousand faraway Strategists, from Alexander of Macedon to Tarf Lu… to Pham Nuwen. Of them all, Pham Nuwen was Nau’s central model, the greatest of the Qeng Ho.

In a sense, Nuwen created the modern Qeng Ho. The Peddler broadcasts described Nuwen’s life in some detail, but they were sugar-coated. There were other versions, contradictory whispers between the stars. Every aspect of his life was worth study. Pham Nuwen had been born on Canberra just before the Qeng Ho landing. The child Nuwen had come into the Qeng Ho from outside… and transformed it. For a few centuries he drove the Peddlers to empire, the greatest empire known. He had been an Alexander to all Human Space. And—as with Alexander—his empire had not lasted.

The man had been a genius of conquest and organization. He simply did not have all the necessary tools.

Nau took a last look at the sky-blue beauty of Arachna as it slipped behind Hammerfest’s towers. He had a dream now. So far, it was a dream he admitted only to himself. In a few years he would conquer a nonhuman race, a race that had once flown between the stars. In a few years he would plumb the deepest secrets of the Qeng Ho fleet automation. With all that, he might be the equal of Pham Nuwen. With all that, he might make a star empire. But Tomas Nau’s dream went further, for he already had a tool of empire that Pham Nuwen and Tarf Lu and all the others had lacked.Focus.

The fulfillment of his dream was half a lifetime away, on the other side of the Exile and deadliness he might not yet imagine. Sometimes he wondered if he was crazy to think he could get there. Ah, but the dream burned so bright in his mind:

With Focus, Tomas Nau might hold what he could grasp. Tomas Nau’s Emergency would become a single empire across all Human Space. And it would be the one that lasted.

SEVENTEEN

Officially, of course, Benny Wen’s booze parlor did not exist. Benny had grabbed some empty utility space between the inner balloons. Working in their free time, he and his father had gradually populated it with furniture, a zero-pool game, video wallpaper. You could still see the utility piping on the walls, but even that was covered with colored tape.

When his tree had the Watch, Pham Trinli spent most of his free time loafing here. And there had been more free time since he botched the L1 stabilization and Qiwi Lisolet took over.

The aroma of hops and barley hit Pham the moment he got past the door. A cluster of beery droplets drifted close by his ear, then zigged into the cleaning vent by the door.

“Hey, Pham, where the hell have you been? Grab a seat.” His usual cronies were mostly sitting on the ceiling side of the game room. Pham gave them a wave and glided across the room to take a seat on the outer wall. It meant he was facing sideways from the others, but there wasn’t that much room here.

Trud Silipan waved across the room at where Benny floated by the bar. “Where’s the beer and frids, Benny boy? Hey, and add on a big one for the military genius here!”

Everyone laughed, though Pham’s response was more an indignant snort. He’d worked hard to be the bluff blowhard. Want to hear a tale of derring-do? Just listen to Pham Trinli for more than a hundred seconds. Of course, if you had any real-world experience yourself, you’d see the stories were mostly fraud—and where they were not, the heroic parts belonged to somebody else. He looked around the room. As usual, more than half the clientele were Follower-class Emergents, but most of the groups contained one or two Qeng Ho. It was more than six years since Relight, since the “Diem atrocity.” For many of them, that was almost two years of lifetime. The surviving Qeng Ho had learned and adapted. They weren’t exactly assimilated, but like Pham Trinli, they had become an integral part of the Exile.

Hunte Wen drifted across the room from the bar. He towed a net full of drink bulbs, and the snack food that was the most he and Benny risked importing to the parlor. Talk lulled for a moment as he passed the goods around, picked up favor scrip in return.

Pham snagged a bulb of the brew. The container was new plastic. Benny had some kind of in with the crews that ran surface operations on the rockpile. The little volatiles plant gulped in airsnow and water ice and ground diamond… and out came raw stocks, including the plastics for drinking bulbs, furniture, the zero-gee pool game. Even the parlor’s chief attraction was the product of the rockpile—touched by the magic of the temp’s bactry.

This bulb had a colored drawing on the side:DIAMOND AND ICE BREWERY , it said, and there was a picture of the rockpile being dissolved into suds. The picture was an intricate thing, evidently from a hand-drawn original. Pham stared at the clever drawing for a moment. He swallowed his wondering questions. In any case, others would ask them… in their own way.

There was a flurry of laughter as Trud and his friends noticed the pictures. “Hey, Hunte, did you do this?”

The elder Wen smiled shyly and nodded.

“Hey, it’s kinda cute. Not like what a Focused artist could do, of course.”

“I thought you were some kind of physicist, before you got your freedom?”

“An astrophysicist. I—I don’t remember much of that anymore. I’m trying new things.”

The Emergents chatted with Wen for several minutes. Most were friendly, and—except for Trud Silipan—seemed genuinely sympathetic. Pham had vague recollections of Hunte Wen before the ambush, impressions of an outspoken, good-natured academic. Well, the good nature remained. The fellow smiled a lot, but a bit too apologetically. His personality was like a ceramic vessel, once shattered, now painstakingly reassembled, functional but fragile.

Wen picked up the last of the payment scrip and drifted back across the room. He stopped halfway to the bar. He drifted close to the wallpaper, and looked out upon the rockpile and the sun. He seemed to have forgotten all of them, was caught once more by the mysteries of the OnOff star. Trud Silipan chuckled and leaned across the table toward Trinli. “Driftier than hell, isn’t he? Most de-zips aren’t that bad.”

Benny Wen came from the bar and drew his father out of sight. Benny had been one of the firebreathers. He was probably the most obvious of Diem’s conspirators to survive.

Talk returned to the important issues of the day. Jau Xin wanted to find someone in Watch tree A who was willing to trade into B; his lady was stuck on the other Watch. It was the sort of swap that had to be cleared by the Podmasters, but if everyone was willing… Someone else pointed out that some Qeng Ho woman down in Quartermaster was brokering such deals, in return for other favors. “Damn Peddlers put a price on everything,” Silipan muttered.

And Trinli regaled them with a story—true actually, but with enough absurdities that they would know it false—about a Long Watch mission he allegedly commanded. “Fifty years we spent with only four Watch groups. In the end I had to break the rules, allow children In Flight. But by that time, we had a market advantage—”

Pham was coming down on the punch line when Trud Silipan jabbed him in the ribs. “Hsst! My Qeng Ho Lord, your nemesis has arrived.” That got a round of chuckles. Pham glared at Silipan, then turned to look.

Qiwi Lin Lisolet had just sailed through the parlor’s doorway. She twisted in midair, and touched down by Benny Wen. There was a lull in the room noise and her voice carried to Trinli’s group up by the ceiling. “Benny! Have you got those swap forms? Gonle can cover—” Her words faded as the two moved to the far side of the bar and other conversations resumed. Qiwi was clearly in full haggle, twisting Benny’s arm about some new deal.

“Is it true she’s still in charge of stabilizing the rockpile? I thought that was your job, Pham.”

Jau Xin grimaced. “Give it a rest, Trud.”

Pham raised a hand, the image of an irritated old man trying to look important. “I told you before, I got promoted. Lisolet handles the field details, and I supervise the whole operation for Podmaster Nau.” He looked in Qiwi’s direction, tried to put just the right truculence into his gaze.Iwonder what she’s up to now. The child was amazing.

From the corner of his eye, Pham saw Silipan shrug apologetically at Jau Xin. They all figured Pham was a fraud, but he was well liked. His tales might be tall, but they were very entertaining. The trouble with Trud Silipan was he didn’t know when to stop goading. Now the fellow was probably trying to think of some way to make amends.

“Yes,” said Silipan, “there aren’t many of us who report directly to the Podmaster. And I’ll tell you something about Qiwi Lin Lisolet.” He looked around to see just who else was in the parlor. “You know I manage the zipheads for Reynolt—well, we provide support for Ritser Brughel’s snoops. I talked to the boys over there. Our Miss Lisolet is on their hot list. She’s involved in more scams than you can imagine.” He gestured at the furniture. “Where do you think this plastic comes from? Now that she’s got Pham’s old job, she’s down on the rockpile all the time. She’s diverting production to people like Benny.”

One of the others waggled a Diamonds and Ice drink bulb at Silipan. “You seem to be enjoying your share, Trud.”

“You know that’s not the point. Look. These are community resources that she and the likes of Benny Wen are messing with.” There were solemn nods from around the table. “Whatever accidental good it does, it’s still theft from the common weal.” His eyes went hard. “In the Plague Time there weren’t many greater sins.”

“Yes, but the Podmasters know about it. It’s not doing any great harm.”

Silipan nodded. “True. They are tolerating it for now.” His smile turned sly. “For maybe as long as she’s sleeping with Podmaster Nau.” That was another rumor that had been going around.

“Look, Pham. You’re Qeng Ho. But basically you’re a military man. That’s an honorable profession, and it sets you high, no matter what your origin. You see, there are moral levels to society.” Silipan was clearly lecturing from the received wisdom. “At the top are the Podmasters, statesmen I guess you’d call them. Below that are the military leaders, and underneath the leaders are the staff planners, the technicians, and the armsmen. Underneath that… are vermin of different categories: fallen members of the useful categories, persons with a chance of fitting back in the system. And below them are the factory workers and farmers. And at the very bottom—combining the worst aspects of all the scum—are the peddlers.” Silipan smiled at Pham. Evidently he felt he was being flattering, that he had set Pham Trinli among the naturally noble. “Traders are the eaters of dead and dying, too cowardly to steal by force.”

Even Trinli’s cover persona should choke on this analysis. Pham blustered, “I’ll have you know the Qeng Ho has been in its present form for thousands of years, Silipan. That’s hardly the mark of failure.”

Silipan smiled with cordial sympathy. “I know it’s hard to accept this, Trinli. You’re a good man, and it’s right to be loyal. But I think you’re coming to understand. The peddlers will always be with us, whether they’re selling unlicensed food in an alley or lurking between the stars. The star-going ones call themselves a civilization, but they’re just the rabble that hangs around the edges of true civilizations.”

Pham grunted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been flattered and insulted so much all at the same time.”

They all laughed, and Trud Silipan seemed to think his lecture had somehow cheered Trinli. Pham finished his little story without further interruption. Talk drifted on to speculation about Arachna’s spider creatures. Ordinarily, Pham would soak up these stories with well-concealed enthusiasm. Today, his lack of attention was not an act. His gaze drifted back to the parlor’s bar table. Benny and Qiwi were half out of sight now, arguing about some deal. Mixed in with all the Emergent insanity, Trud Silipan did have a few things right. Over the last couple of years, an underground had bloomed here. It wasn’t the violent subversion of Jimmy Diem’s conspiracy. In the minds of the Qeng Ho participants it wasn’t a conspiracy at all, merely getting on with business. Benny and his father and dozens of others were routinely bending and even violating Podmaster dicta. So far Nau hadn’t retaliated; so far, the Qeng Ho underground had improved the situation for almost everyone. Pham had seen this sort of thing happen once or twice before—when Qeng Ho couldn’t trade as free human beings, and couldn’t run, and couldn’t fight.

Little Qiwi Lin Lisolet was at the center of it all. Pham’s gaze rested on her wonderingly. For a moment, he forgot to glower. Qiwi had lost so much. By some standards of honor, she had sold out. Yet here she was, awake Watch on Watch, in a position to do deals in all directions. Pham bit back the fond smile he felt growing on his lips, and frowned at her. If Trud Silipan or Jau Xin ever knew how he really felt about Qiwi Lisolet, they would think him stark raving mad. If someone as clever as Tomas Nau ever understood, he might put two and two together—and that would be the end of Pham Trinli.

When Pham looked at Qiwi Lin Lisolet, he saw—more than he ever had before in his life—himself.True, Qiwi was female, and sexism was one of Trinli’s peculiarities that was not an act. But the similarities between them went deeper than gender. Qiwi had been—what, eight years old?—when she had started on this voyage. She had lived almost half her childhood in the dark between the stars, alone but for the fleet’s maintenance Watches. And now she was plunged into a totally different culture. And still she survived, and faced up to every new challenge. And she was winning.

Pham’s mind turned inward. He wasn’t listening to his drinking buddies anymore. He wasn’t even watching Qiwi Lin Lisolet. He was remembering a time more than three thousand years ago, across three centuries of his own lifetime.

Canberra. Pham had been thirteen, the youngest son of Tran Nuwen, King and Lord of all the Northland. Pham had grown up with swords and poison and intrigue, living in stone castles by a cold, cold sea. No doubt he would have ended up murdered—or king of all—if life had continued in the medieval way. But when he was thirteen everything changed. A world that had only legends of aircraft and radio was confronted by interstellar traders, the Qeng Ho. Pham still remembered the scorch their pinnaces had made of the Great Swamp south of the castle. In a single year, Canberra’s feudal politics was turned on its head.

The Qeng Ho had invested three ships in the expedition to Canberra. They had seriously miscalculated, thinking the locals would be at a much higher level of technology by the time of their arrival. But even Tran Nuwen’s realm couldn’t resupply them. Two of the ships stayed behind. Young Pham left with the third—a crazy hostage deal his father thought he was putting over on the star folk.

Pham’s last day on Canberra was cold and foggy. The trip from the castle walls down to the fen took most of the morning. It was the first time he had been allowed to see the visitors’ great ships close up, and little Pham Nuwen was on a crest of joy. There might never be a moment in Pham’s life when he had so many things wrong and backwards: The starships that loomed out of the mists were simply landing pinnaces. The tall, strange captain who greeted Pham’s father was in fact a second officer. Three subordinate steps behind him walked a young woman, her face twisted with barely concealed discomfort—a concubine? a handmaiden? The real captain, it turned out.

Pham’s father the King gave a hand signal. The boy’s tutor and his dour servants marched him across the mud, toward the star folk. The hands on his shoulders were holding tight, but Pham didn’t notice. He looked up, wondering, his eyes devouring the “starships,” trying to follow the sweeping curves of glistening maybe-metal. In a painting or a small piece of jewelry he had seen such perfection—but this was dream incarnate.

They might have gotten him aboard the pinnace before he really understood the betrayal, if it hadn’t been for Cindi. Cindi Ducanh, lesser daughter of Tran’s cousin. Her family was important enough to live at court, but not important enough to matter. Cindi was fifteen, the strangest, wildest person Pham had ever known, so strange that he didn’t even have a word for what she was—though “friend” would have sufficed.

Suddenly she was there, standing between them and the star folk. “No! It’s not right. It does no good. Don’t—” She held her hands up, as if to stop them. From the side, Pham could hear a woman shouting. It was Cindi’s mother, screaming at her daughter.

It was such a silly, stupid, hopeless gesture. Pham’s party didn’t even slow down. His tutor swung his quarterstaff in a low arc across Cindi’s legs. She went down.

Pham turned, tried to reach out to her, but now hard hands lifted him, trapped his arms and legs. His last glimpse of Cindi was her struggling up from the mud, still looking in his direction, oblivious of the axemen running toward her. Pham Nuwen never learned how much it had cost the one person who had stood up to protect him. Centuries later, he had returned to Canberra, rich enough to buy the planet even in its newly civilized state. He had probed the old libraries, the fragmented digital records of the Qeng Ho who had stayed behind. There had been nothing about the aftermath of Cindi’s action, nothing certain in the birth records of Cindi’s family forward from her time. She and what she had done and what it had cost were simply insignificant in the eyes of time.

Pham was swept up, carried quickly forward. He had a brief vision of his brothers and sisters, young men and women with cold, hard faces. Today, one very small threat was being removed. The servants stopped briefly before Pham’s father the King. The old man—forty years old, actually—stared down at him briefly. Tran had always been a distant force of nature, capricious behind ranks of tutors and contesting heirs and courtiers. His lips were drawn down in a thin line. For an instant something like sympathy might have lived in the hard eyes. He touched the side of Pham’s face. “Be strong, boy. You bear my name.”

Tran turned, spoke pidgin words to the star man. And Pham was in alien hands.

Like Qiwi Lin Lisolet, Pham Nuwen had been cast out into the great darkness. And like Qiwi, Pham did not belong.

He remembered those first years more clearly than any other time in his life. No doubt the crew intended to pop him into cold storage and dump him at the next stop. What can you make of a kid who thinks there’s one world and it’s flat, who has spent his whole life learning to whack about with a sword?

Pham Nuwen had had his own agenda. The coldsleep coffins scared the devil out of him. TheReprise had scarcely left Canberra orbit when little Pham disappeared from his appointed cabin. He had always been small for his age, and by now he understood about remote surveillance. He kept the crew of theReprise busy for more than four days searching for him. In the end, of course, Pham lost—and some very angry Qeng Ho dragged him before the ship’s master.

By now he knew that was the “handmaiden” he had seen in the fen. Even knowing, it was still hard to believe. One weak woman, commanding a starship and a crew of a thousand (though soon almost all of those were off-Watch, in coldsleep). Hmm. Maybe she had been the owner’s concubine, but had poisoned him and now ruled in his place. That was a credible scenario, but it made her an exceptionally dangerous person. In fact, Sura had been a junior captain, the leader of the faction that voted against staying at Canberra. Those who stayed called them “the cautious cowards.” And now they were heading home, into certain bankruptcy.

Pham remembered the look on her face when they finally caught him and brought him to the bridge. She had scowled down at the little prince, a boy still dressed in the velvet of Canberran nobility.

“You’ve delayed the start of the Watches, young fellow.”

The language was barely intelligible to Pham. The boy pushed down the panic and the loneliness and glared right back at her. “Madam. I am your hostage, not your slave, not your victim.”

“Damn, what did he say?” Sura Vinh looked around at her lieutenants. “Look, son. It’s a sixty-year flight. We’ve got to put you away.”

That last comment got through the language barrier, but it sounded too much like what the stable boss said when he was going to behead a horse. “No!You’ll not put me in a coffin.”

And Sura Vinh understood that, too.

One of the others spoke abruptly to Shipmaster Vinh. Probably something like “It doesn’t matter what he wants, ma’am.”

Pham tensed himself for another futile wrestling match. But Sura just stared at him for a second and then ordered everyone else out of her office. The two of them talked pidgin for some Ksecs. Pham knew court intrigue and strategy, and none of it seemed to apply here. Before they were done, the little boy was crying inconsolably and Sura had her arm across his shoulders. “It will be years,” she said. “You understand that?”

“…Y-yes.”

“You’ll arrive an old man if you don’t let us put you in coldsleep.” That last was still an unfortunate word.

“No, no, no!I’ll die first.” Pham Nuwen was beyond logic.

Sura was silent for a moment. Years later, she told Phamher side of the encounter: “Yeah, I could have heaved you in the freezer. It would have been prudent and ethical—and it would have saved me a world of problems. I will never understand why Deng’s fleet committee forced me to accept you; they were petty and pissed, but this was too much.

“So there you were, a little kid sold out by his own father. I’d be damned if I’d treat you the way he and the committee did. Besides, if you spent the flight on ice, you’d still be a zero when we got to Namqem, helpless in a tech civilization. So why not let you stay out of coldsleep and try to teach you the basics? I figured you’d see how long the years looked in a ship between the stars. In a few years, the coldsleep coffins might not seem quite so terrible to you.”

It hadn’t been simple. Ship security had to be reprogrammed for the presence of an irresponsible human. No uncrewed Tween Watches could be allowed. But the programming was done, and several of the Watch standers volunteered to extend their time out of coldsleep.

TheReprise reached ramcruise, 0.3 lightspeed, and sailed endlessly across the depths.

And Pham Nuwen had all the time in the universe. Several crewfolk—Sura for the first few Watches—did their best to tutor him. At first, he would have none of it… but the time stretched long. He learned to speak Sura’s language. He learned generalities about Qeng Ho.

“We trade between the stars,” said Sura. The two were sitting alone on the ramscoop’s bridge. The windows showed a symbolic map of the five star systems that the Qeng Ho circuited.

“Qeng Ho is an empire,” the boy said, looking out at the stars and trying to imagine how those territories compared with his father’s kingdom.

Sura laughed. “No, not an empire. No government can maintain itself across light-years. Hell, most governments don’t last more than a few centuries. Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.”

Little Pham Nuwen frowned. Even now, Sura’s words were sometimes nonsense. “No. It has to be an empire.”

Sura didn’t argue. A few days later, she went off-Watch, dead in one of the strange, cold coffins. Pham almost begged her not to kill herself, and for Msecs afterward he grieved on wounds he hadn’t imagined before. Now there were other strangers, and unending days of silence. Eventually he learned to read Nese.

And two years later, Sura returned from the dead. The boy still refused to go off-Watch, but from that point on he welcomed everything they wanted to teach him. He knew there was power beyond any Canberran lordship here, and now he understood that he might be master of it. In two years, he made up for what a child of civilization might learn in five. He had a competency in math; he could use the top- and second-level Qeng Ho program interfaces.

Sura looked almost the same as before her coldsleep, except that in some strange way, she seemed younger now. One day he caught her staring at him.

“So what’s the problem?” Pham asked.

Sura grinned. “I never saw a kid on a long flight. You’re what now, fifteen Canberra years old? Bret tells me you’ve learned a lot.”

“Yes. I’m going to be Qeng Ho.”

“Hmm.” She smiled, but it was not the patronizing, sympathy-filled smile that Pham remembered. She was truly pleased, and she didn’t disbelieve his claim. “You’ve got an awful lot to learn.”

“I’ve got an awful lot of time to do it.”

Sura Vinh stayed on Watch four straight years that time. Bret Trinli stayed for the first of those years, extending his own Watch. The three of them trekked through every accessible cubic meter of theReprise: the sick-bay and coffins, the control deck, the fuel tanks. TheReprise had burned almost two million tonnes of hydrogen to reach ramcruise speeds. In effect, she was a vast, nearly empty hulk now. “And without lots of support at the destination, this ship will never fly again.”

“You could refuel, even if there were only gas giants at the destination. Even I could manage the programs for that.”

“Yeah, and that’s what we did at Canberra. But without an overhaul, we can’t go far and we can’t do zip once we get there.” Sura paused, cursed under her breath. “Those damn fools. Why did they stay behind?” Sura seemed caught between her contempt for the shipmasters who had stayed to conquer Canberra, and her own guilt at having deserted them.

Bret Trinli broke the silence. “Don’t feel so bad for them. They’re taking a big chance, but if they win, they’ll have the Customers we were all expecting there.”

“I know—and we’re guaranteed to arrive at Namqem with nothing. Bet we’ll lose theReprise. “ She shook herself, visibly pushing back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. “Okay, in the meantime we’re going to create one more trained crewmember.” She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. “What specialty do we need the most, Bret?”

Trinli rolled his eyes. “You mean that can bring us the most income? Obviously: Programmer-Archeologist.”

The question was, could a feral child like Pham Nuwen ever become one? By now, the boy could use almost all the standard interfaces. He even thought of himself as a programmer, and potentially a ship’s master. With the standard interfaces, one could fly theReprise, execute planetary orbit insertion, monitor the coldsleep coffins—

“And if anything goes wrong, you’re dead, dead, dead” was how Sura finished Pham’s litany of prowess. “Boy, you have to learn something. It’s something that children in civilization often are confused about, too. We’ve had computers and programs since the beginning of civilization, even before spaceflight. But there’s only so much they can do; they can’t think their way out of an unexpected jam or do anything really creative.”

“But—I know that’s not true. I play games with the machines. If I set the skill ratings high, I never win.”

“That’s just computers doing simple things, very fast. There is only one important way that computers are anything like wise. They contain thousands of years of programs, and can run most of them. In a sense, they remember every slick trick that Humankind has ever devised.”

Bret Trinli sniffed. “Along with all the nonsense.”

Sura shrugged. “Of course. Look. What’s our crew size—when we’re in-system and everybody is up?”

“One thousand and twenty-three,” said Pham. He had long since learned every physical characteristic of theReprise and this voyage.

“Okay. Now, suppose you’re light-years from nowhere—”

Trinli: “You don’t have to suppose that, it’s the pure truth.”

“—and something goes wrong. It takes perhaps ten thousand human specialties to build a starship, and that’s on top of an enormous capital industry base. There’s no way a ship’s crew can know everything it takes to analyze a star’s spectrum, and make a vaccine against some wild change in the bactry, and understand every deficiency disease we may meet—”

“Yes!” said Pham. “That’s why we have the programs and the computers.”

“That’s why we can’t survive without them. Over thousands of years, the machine memories have been filled with programs that can help. But like Bret says, many of those programs are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs.” She paused, looked at Pham significantly. “It takes a smart and highly trained human being to look at what is available, to choose and modify the right programs, and then to interpret the results properly.”

Pham was silent for a moment, thinking back to all the times the machines had not done what he really wanted. It wasn’t always Pham’s fault. The programs that tried to translate Canberran to Nese were crap. “So… you want me to learn to program something better.”

Sura grinned, and there was a barely suppressed chuckle from Bret. “We’ll be satisfied if you become a good programmer, and then learn to use the stuff that already exists.”

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within theReprise ’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.

“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”

“Almostprecisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.”

“Yes, which I’ve almost completed.” She glanced at Pham, saw the look on his face. “Aha. I thought you’d rather die than use a coffin.”

Pham smiled shyly, remembering the little boy of six years before. “No, I’ll use it. Someday.”

That day was another five years of Pham’s lifetime away. They were busy years. Both Bret and Sura were off-Watch, and Pham never felt close to their replacements. The foursome played musical instruments—manually, just like minstrels at court! They’d do it for Ksecs on end; there seemed be some strange mental/social high they got from playing together. Pham was vaguely affected by music, but these people worked so hard for such ordinary results. Pham did not have the patience even to begin down that path. He drifted off. Being alone was something he was very good at. There was so much to learn.

The more he studied, the more he understood what Sura Vinh had meant about “mature programming environments.” By comparison with the crew members he knew, Pham had become an excellent programmer. “Flaming genius” was how he’d heard Sura describe him when she hadn’t known he was nearby. He could code anything—but life is short, and most significant systems were terribly large. So Pham learned to hack about with the leviathans of the past. He could interface weapons code from Eldritch Faerie with patched conic planners from before the conquest of space. Just as important, he knew how and where to look for possibly appropriate applications hidden in the ship’s network.

…And he learned something about mature programming environments that Sura had never quite said. When systems depended on underlying systems, and those depended on things still older… it became impossible to know all the systems could do. Deep in the interior of fleet automation there could be—there must be—a maze of trapdoors. Most of the authors were thousands of years dead, their hidden accesses probably lost forever. Other traps had been set by companies or governments that hoped to survive the passage of time. Sura and Bret and maybe a few of the others knew things about the Reprise’s systems that gave them special powers.

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system…. If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

Eleven years had passed since a certain frightened thirteen-year-old had been taken from Canberra.

Sura had just returned from coldsleep. It was a return that Pham had awaited with increasing desire… since just after she departed. There was so much he wanted to tell her, so much to ask her and show her. Yet when the time finally came, he couldn’t bring himself to stay at the coldsleep hold and greet her.

She found him in an equipment bay on the aft hull, a tiny niche with a real window on the stars. It was a place that Pham had appropriated several years earlier.

There was tap on the light plastic cover. He slipped it aside.

“Hello, Pham.” Sura had a strange smile on her face.She looked strange. So young. In fact, she simply hadn’t aged. And now Pham Nuwen had lived twenty-four years. He waved her into the tiny room. She floated close past him, and turned. Her eyes were solemn above the smile. “You’ve grown up, friend.”

Pham started to shake his head. “Yes. But I—you are still ahead of me.”

“Maybe. In some ways. But you’re twice the programmer I will ever be. I saw the solutions you worked out for Ceng this last Watch.”

They sat, and she asked him about Ceng’s problems and his solutions. All the glib speeches and bravado he’d spent the last year planning were swept from his mind, his conversation reduced to awkward starts and stops. Sura didn’t seem to notice.Damn. How does a Qeng Ho man take a woman? On Canberra, he had grown up believing in chivalry and sacrifice… and had gradually learned that the true method was very different: a gentleman simply grabbed what he wanted, assuming a more powerful gentleman did not already own it. Pham’s own personal experience was limited and surely untypical: poor Cindi had grabbedhim. At the beginning of the last Watch, he had tried the true Canberra method on one of the female crew. Xina Rao had broken his wrist and made a formal complaint. It was something Sura would surely hear about sooner or later.

The thought blew away Pham’s tenuous hold on the conversation. He stared at Sura in embarrassed silence, then blurted out the announcement he had been holding secret for some special moment. “I… I’m going to go off-Watch, Sura. I’ll finally start coldsleep.”

She nodded solemnly, as if she had never guessed.

“You know what really did it for me, Sura? The dustmote that broke me? It was three years ago. You were off-Watch,” and I realized how longit would be until next I saw you. “I was trying to make that second-level celestial mech stuff work. You really have to understand some math to do that. For a while, I was stumped. For the hell of it, I moved up here, just started staring at the sky. I’ve done that before. Every year, my sun is dimmer; it’s scary.”

“I’ll bet,” said Sura, “but I didn’t know you could see directly aft, even from here.” She slid near the forty-centimeter port, and killed the lights.

“Yes you can,” said Pham, “at least when your eyes adjust.” The room was dark as pitch now. This was areal window, not some enhancing display device. He moved close behind her. “See, there’s the four bright stars of the Pikeman. Now Canberra’s star just makes his pole one tong longer.” Silly. She doesn’t know the Canberran sky. He babbled on, a mindless cover for what he was feeling. “But even that is not what got me; my sun is another star, so what? The thing is, the constellations: the Pikeman, the Wild Goose, the Plow. I can still recognize them, but even their shapes have changed. I know, I should have expected that. I’d been doing the math behind much harder things. But… it struck me. In eleven years, we have moved so far that the whole sky has changed. It gave me a gut feeling of how far we’ve come, how very far we still have to go.”

He gestured in the dark, and his palm slapped lightly on the smooth swell of her rear. His voice died in a little squeak, and for a measurable instant his hand sat motionless on her pants, his fingers touching her bare flesh just above the hip line. Somehow he hadn’t noticed before; her blouse wasn’t even tucked in. His hand swept around her waist and upward across the smooth curve of her belly, kept moving till he touched the undersides of her breasts. The move was a grab, modified and tentative perhaps, but a definite grab.

Sura’s reaction was almost as swift as Xina Rao’s had been. She twisted beneath him, her breast centering in the palm of his other hand. Before Pham could get out of her way, her arm was behind his neck, levering him down… for a long, hard kiss. He felt multiple shocks where his lips touched hers, where his hand rested, where her leg slid up between his.

And now she was pulling his shirt from his pants, forcing their bodies into a single long touch. She leaned her head back from his lips and laughed softly. “Lord! I’ve been wanting to get my hands on you ever since you were fifteen years old.”

But why didn’t you? I was in your power.It was the last coherent thought he had for some time. In the dark, there loomed more wonderful questions. How to get leverage, how to join the smooth endpoints of softness and hard. They bounced randomly from wall to wall, and poor Pham might never have found his way if not for his partner and guide.

Afterward she brought up the lights, and showed him how to do it in his sleeping hammock. And then again, with the lights out once more. After a long while, they floated exhausted in the dark. Peace and joy, and his arms were so full with her. Starlight was a magical faintness, that after enough time seemed almost bright. Bright enough to glint on Sura’s eyes, to show the white of her teeth. She was smiling. “You’re right about the stars,” she said. “It is a bit humbling to see the sweep of the stars, to know how little we count.”

Pham squeezed her gently, but was for the moment so satisfied he could actually think about what she said. “…Yes, it’s scary. But at the same time, I look out and realize that with starships and coldsleep, we are outside and beyond them. We can make what we want of the universe.”

The white of Sura’s smile broadened. “Ah, Pham, maybe you haven’t changed. I remember the first days of little Pham, when you could barely spit out an intelligible sentence. You kept insisting the Qeng Ho was an empire, and I kept saying we were simply traders, could never be anything more.”

“I remember, but still I don’t understand. Qeng Ho has been around for how long?”

“That name for ‘trading fleet’? Maybe two thousand years.”

“That’s longer than most empires.”

“Sure, and part of the reason is, we’re not an empire. It’s our function that makes us seem everlasting. The Qeng Ho of two thousand years ago had a different language, had no common culture with now. I’m sure that things like it exist off and on through all Human Space. It’s a process, not a government.”

“Just a bunch of guys who happen to be doing similar things?”

“You got it.”

Pham was silent for a while. She just didn’t understand. “Okay. That is the way things are now. But don’t you see the power that this gives you? You hold a high technology across hundreds of light-years of space and thousands of years of time.”

“No. That’s like saying the sea surf could rule a world: it’s everywhere, it’s powerful, and it seems to be coordinated.”

“You could have a network, like the fleet network you used at Canberra.”

“Lightspeed, Pham, remember? Nothing goes faster. I’ve no idea what traders are doing on the other side of Human Space—and at best that information would be centuries out of date. The most you’ve seen is networking across theReprise; you’ve studied how a small fleet network is run. I doubt you can imagine the sort of net it takes to support a planetary civilization. You’ll see at Namqem. Every time we visit a place like that, we lose some crew. Life with a planetary network, where you can interact with millions of people with millisecond latencies—that is something you are still blind to. I’ll bet when we get to Namqem, you’ll leave, too.”

“I’ll never—”

But Sura was turning in his embrace, her breasts sliding across his chest, her hand sweeping down his belly, reaching. Pham’s denial was lost in his body’s electric response.

After that, Pham moved into Sura’s cruise quarters. They spent so much time together that the other Watch standers teased him for “kidnapping our captain.” In fact, the time with Sura Vinh was unending joy to Pham, but it was not just lust fulfilled. They talked and talked and argued and argued… and set the course of the rest of their lives.

And sometimes he thought of Cindi. Both she and Sura had come after him, lifting him to new awareness. They had both taught him things, argued with him, and bedeviled him. But they were as different as summer from winter, as different as a pond from an ocean. Cindi had stood up for him at the risk of her life, stood alone against all the King’s men. In his wildest dreams, Pham could not imagine Sura Vinh committing her life against such odds. No, Sura was infinitely thoughtful and cautious. It was she who had analyzed the risks of remaining at Canberra, and concluded that success was unlikely—and persuaded enough others about those risks to wangle a ship from the fleet committee and escape Canberra space. Sura Vinh planned for the long haul, saw problems where no one else could see. She avoided risks—or confronted them with overwhelming force of her own. In Pham’s confused moral pantheon, she was much less than Cindi… and much more.

Sura never bought his notion of a Qeng Ho star kingdom. But she didn’t simply deny him; she showered him with books, with economics and histories that had eluded his decade-long reading schedule. A reasonable person would have accepted her point; there had been so many “common sense” things that Pham Nuwen had been wrong about before. But Pham still had his old stubbornness. Maybe it was Sura who wore blinders. “We could build an interstellar net. It would just be… slow.”

Sura laughed. “Yeah! Slow. Like a three-way handshake would take a thousand years!”

“Well, obviously the protocols would be different. And the usage, too. But it could change the random trading function into something much more, ah, profitable.” He had almost saidpowerful, but he knew that would just get him zinged about his “medieval” mind-set. “We could keep a floating database of Customers.”

Sura shook her head, “But out of date by decades to millennia.”

“We could maintain human language standards. Our network programming standards would outlive any Customer government. Our trading culture could last forever.”

“But Qeng Ho is just one fish in a random sea of traders…. Oh.” Pham could see that he was finally getting through. “So the ‘culture’ of our broadcasts would give participants a trading edge. So there would be a reinforcement effect.”

“Yes, yes! And we could crypto-partition the broadcasts to protect against nearby competition.” Pham smiled slyly. The next point was something that little Pham, and probably Pham’s father the King of all Northland, could never have conceived. “In fact, we could even have some broadcasts in the clear. The language standards material, for instance, and the low end of our tech libraries. I’ve been reading the Customer histories. All the way back to Old Earth, the only constant is the churn, the rise of civilization, the fall, as often as not the local extinction of Humankind. Over time, Qeng Ho broadcasts could damp those swings.”

Sura was nodding, a far look settling into her eyes. “Yes. If we did it right, we’d end up with Customer cultures that spokeour language, were molded to our trading needs, and usedour programming environment—” Her gaze snapped up to his face. “You still have empire on the brain, don’t you?”

Pham just smiled.

Sura had a million objections, but she had caught the spirit of the idea, recast it into her experience, and now her entire imagination was working alongside his. As the days passed, her objections became more like suggestions, and their arguments more a kind of wondrous scheming.

“You’re crazy, Pham… but that doesn’t matter. Maybe it takes a crazy medievalist to be so ambitious. It’s like… it’s like we’re creating a civilization out of whole cloth. We can set up our own myths, our own conventions. We’ll be in at the ground floor of everything.”

“And we’ll outlast any competition.”

“Lord,” Sura said softly. (It would be some time before they invented the “Lord of All Trade” and the pantheon of lesser gods.) “And you know, Namqem is the ideal place to start. They’re about as advanced as a civilization can ever get, but they’re getting a little cynical and decadent. They have propaganda techs as good as any in human histories. What you’re suggesting is strange, but it’s trivial compared to ad campaigns on a planetary net. If my cousins are still in Namqem space, I bet they’d bankroll the operation.” She laughed, joyous and almost childlike, and Pham realized how badly the fear of bankruptcy and disgrace had bent her down. “Hell, we’re gonna turn aprofit !”

The rest of their Watch was a nonstop orgy of imagination and invention and lust. Pham came up with a combination of beamed and broadcast interstellar radio, schedules that could keep fleets and families in synch across centuries. Sura accepted most of the protocol design, wonder and obvious delight in her eyes. As for the human engineering, Pham’s scheme of hereditary lords and military fleets—Sura laughed at those, and Pham did not argue the judgment. After all, in people-things he was still scarcely more than a thirteen-year-old medieval.

In fact, Sura Vinh was far more awed than patronizing. Pham remembered their last conversation before he took his first turn in a coldsleep coffin. Sura had been calibrating the radiative coolers, checking the hypothermia drugs. “We’ll come out almost together, Pham, me a hundred Ksec before you. I’ll be here to help.” She smiled and he could feel her gaze gently searching in him. “Don’t worry.”

Pham made some flippant remark, but of course she saw the uneasiness in him. She spoke of other things as he slipped into the coffin, a running monologue of their plans and daydreams, what they would begin when they finally reached Namqem. And then it was time, and she hesitated. She leaned down and kissed him lightly on the lips. Her smile turned faintly teasing, but she was mocking herself as much as him: “Sleep well, sweet prince.”

And then she was gone, and the drugs were taking effect. It didn’t feel cold at all. His last thoughts were a strange floating back across his past. During Pham’s childhood on Canberra, his father had been a faraway figure. His own brothers had been lethal threats to his existence. Cindi, he had lost Cindi before he ever really understood. But for Sura Vinh… he had the feeling of a grown child for a loving parent, the feeling of a man for his woman, the feeling of a human being for a dear friend.

In some fundamental sense, Sura Vinh had been all those things. For much of her long life, Sura Vinh had seemed to be his friend. And even though she was ultimately his betrayer—still, there at the beginning, Sura Vinh had been a woman good and true.

Someone was shaking him gently, waving a hand in his face. “Hey, Trinli! Pham! Are you still with us?” It was Jau Xin, and he looked genuinely concerned.

“Ungh, yes, yes. I’m fine.”

“You sure?” Xin watched him for several seconds, then drifted back to his seat. “I had an uncle who went all glassy-eyed like you just did. Tas a stroke, and he—”

“Yeah, well I’m fine. Never better.” Pham put the bluster back in his voice. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”

The claim provoked diversionary laughter all round the table. “Thinking. A bad habit, Pham, old boy!” After a few moments, their concern faded. Pham listened attentively now, occasionally injecting loud opinions.

In fact, invasive daydreaming had been a feature of his personality since at least his leaving the Canberra. He’d get totally wrapped up in memories or planning, and lose himself the way some people did in immersion videos. He’d screwed up at least one deal because of it. From the corner of his eye, he could see that Qiwi was gone. Yes, the girl’s childhood had been much like his, and maybe that accounted for her imagination and drive now. In fact, he had often wondered if the Strentmannians’ crazy childrearing was based on stories of Pham’s time on theReprise. At least when he had reached his destination, things got better. Poor Qiwi had found only death and deception here. But she still kept going….

“We’re getting good translations now.” Trud Silipan was back on the Spiders. “I’m in charge of Reynolt’s translator zipheads.” Trud was more like an attendant than a manager, but no one pointed that out. “I tell you, any day now we’ll start getting information about what the Spiders’ original civilization was like.”

“I don’t know, Trud. Everyone says this must be a fallen colony. But if the Spiders are elsewhere in space, how come we don’t hear their radio?”

Pham: “Look. We’ve been over this before. Arachna must be a colony world. This system is just too hostile for life to start naturally.”

And someone else: “Maybe the creatures don’t have a Qeng Ho.” Chuckles went round the table.

“No, there’d still be plenty of radio noise. We’d hear them.”

“Maybe the rest of them are really far away, like the Perseus Mumbling—”

“Or maybe they’re so advanced they don’t use radio. We only noticed these guys because they’re starting over.” It was an old, old argument, part of a mystery that extended back to the Age of Failed Dreams. More than anything else it was what had drawn the human expeditions to Arachna. It was certainly what had drawn Pham.

And indeed, Pham had already found Something New, something so powerful that the origin of the Spiders was now a peripheral issue for him. Pham had found Focus. With Focus, the Emergents could convert their brightest people into dedicated machines of thought. A dud like Trud Silipan could get effective translations at the touch of a key. A monster like Tomas Nau could have eyes unresting. Focus gave the Emergents a power that no one had ever had before, subtlety that surpassed any machine and patience that surpassed any human. That was one of the Failed Dreams—but they had achieved it.

Watching Silipan pontificate, Pham realized that the next stage in his plan had finally arrived. The low-level Emergents had accepted Pham Trinli. Nau tolerated, even humored him, thinking he might be an unknowing window on the Qeng Ho military mind. It was time to learn a lot more about Focus. Learn from Silipan, from Reynolt… someday learn the technical side of the thing.

Pham had tried to build a true civilization across all of Human Space. For a few brief centuries it had seemed he might succeed. In the end, he had been betrayed. But Pham had long ago realized that the betrayal had been just the overt failure. What Sura and the others did to him at Brisgo Gap had been inevitable. An interstellar empire covers so much space, so much time. The goodness and justice of such a thing is not enough. You need an edge.

Pham Nuwen raised his bulb of Diamonds and Ice and drank an unnoticed toast, to the lessons of the past and the promise of the future. This time he would do things right.

EIGHTEEN

Ezr Vinh’s first two years after the ambush were spread across nearly eight years of objective time. Almost like a good Qeng Ho captain, Tomas Nau was pacing their duty time to match local developments. Qiwi and her crews were out of coldsleep more than any, but even they were slowing down.

Anne Reynolt kept her astrophysicists busy, too. OnOff continued to settle along the light curve that had been seen in previous centuries; to a lay observer, it looked like a normal, hydrogen-eating sun, complete with sunspots. At first, she held the other academics to a lower duty cycle, awaiting the resumption of Spider activity.

Military radio transmissions were heard from Arachna less than one day after the Relight, even while steam-storms churned the surface. Apparently, the Off phase of the sun had interrupted some local war. Within a year or two, there were dozens of transmission sites on two continents. Every two centuries these creatures had to rebuild their surface structures almost from the foundations up, but apparently they were very good at it. When gaps showed in the cloud cover, the spacers caught sight of new roads, towns.

By the fourth year there were two thousand transmission points, the classical fixed-station model. Now Trixia Bonsol and the other linguists went to a heavier duty cycle. For the first time they had continuous audio to study.

When their Watches matched—and they often did now—Ezr visited Trixia Bonsol every day. At first, Trixia was more remote than ever. She didn’t seem to hear him; the Spider talk flooded her workroom. The sounds were a squeaking shrillness that changed from day to day as Trixia and the other Focused linguists determined where in the acoustic spectrum the sense of Spider talk was hidden, and devised convenient representations, both auditory and visual, for its study. Eventually, Trixia had a usable data representation.

And then the translations really began. Reynolt’s Focused translators grabbed everything they could get, producing thousands of words of semi-intelligible text per day. Trixia was the best. That was obvious from the beginning. It was her work with the physics texts that had been the original breakthrough, and it was she who melded that written language with the language spoken in two-thirds of the radio broadcasts. Even compared to the Qeng Ho linguists, Trixia Bonsol excelled; how proud she would be if only she could know. “She’s indispensable.” Reynolt passed sentence with her typical flat affect, free of both praise and sadism, a statement of fact. Trixia Bonsol would get no early out, as Hunte Wen had.

Vinh tried to read everything the translators produced. At first it was typical of raw field linguistics, where each sentence consisted of dozens of pointers to alternative meanings, alternative parsings. After a few Msecs, the translations were almost readable. There were living beings down there on Arachna, and these were their words.

Some of the Focused linguists never got beyond the annotated-style translations. They were caught in the lower levels of meaning and fought any attempt to capture the spirit of the aliens. Maybe that was enough. For one thing, they learned that the Spiders had no knowledge of any previous civilization:

“We’re seeing no mention of a golden age of technology.”

Nau looked at Reynolt skeptically. “That’s suspicious in itself. Even on Old Earth, there were at least myths of a lost past.” And if ever there were an origin world, it was Old Earth.

Reynolt shrugged. “I’m telling you that any mention of past technical civilizations is below the plausible background level. For instance, as far as we can tell, archeology is considered an insignificant academic pursuit”—not the world-creating frenzy of the typical fallen colony.

“Well, Plague take it,” said Ritser Brughel. “If there’s nothing for these guys to dig up, our payoff is just about crap.”

Pity you didn’t think of that before you came,thought Ezr.

Nau looked sour and surprised, but he disagreed with Brughel:

“We’ve still got Dr. Li’s results.” His glance flickered across the Qeng Ho at the foot of the table, and Ezr was sure that something else passed through the Emergent’s mind:We’ve still got a Qeng Ho fleet library, andPeddlers to explore it for us.

Trixia let Ezr touch her now, sometimes to comb her hair, sometimes just to pat her shoulder. Maybe he had spent so much time in her workroom that she thought of him as a piece of furniture, as safe as any other voice-activated machine. Trixia normally worked with a head-up display now; sometimes that gave the comforting illusion that she was actually looking at him. She would even answer his questions, as long as they stayed within the scope of her Focus and did not interrupt her conversations with her equipment and the other translators.

Much of the time, Trixia sat in the semidarkness, listening and speaking her translations at the same time. Several of the translators worked in that mode, scarcely more than automatons. Trixia was different, Vinh liked to think: like the others, she analyzed and reanalyzed, but not to insert a dozen extra interpretations beneath every syntactic structure. Trixia’s translations seemed to reach for the meaning as it was in the minds of the speakers, in minds for which the Spider world was a normal, familiar place. Trixia Bonsol’s translations were… art.

Art was not what Anne Reynolt was looking for. At first she had only little things to complain about. The translators chose an alternative orthography for their output; they represented thex ? andq ? glyphs with digraphs. It made their translations look very quaint. Fortunately, Trixia wasn’t the first to use the bizarre scheme. Unfortunately, she originated far too much of the questionable novelty.

One terrible day, Reynolt threatened to bar Ezr from Trixia’s workroom—that is, from Trixia’s life. “Whatever you’re doing, Vinh, it’s messing her up. She’s giving me figurative translations. Look at these names: ‘Sherkaner Underhill,’ ‘Jaybert Landers.’ She’s throwing away complications that all the translators agree on. In other places she’s making up nonsense syllables.”

“She’s doing just what she should be doing, Reynolt. You’ve been working with automatons too long.” One thing about Reynolt: Though she was crass even by Emergent standards, she never seemed vindictive. She could even be argued with. But if she barred him from seeing Trixia…

Reynolt stared at him for a moment. “You’re no linguist.”

“I’m Qeng Ho. To make our way, we’ve had to understand the heart of thousands of human cultures, and a couple of nonhuman ones. You people have mucked around this small end of Human Space, with languages based on our broadcasts. There are languages that are enormously different.”

“Yes. That’s why her grotesque simplifications are not acceptable.”

“No! You need people who truly understand the other side’s minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens’ differences. So Trixia’s Spider names look silly. But this ‘Accord’ group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language.”

“Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spider talk merges given names and surnames, that interphonation trick.”

“I’m telling you, what Trixia is doing is fine. I’ll bet the given names are from older and related languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them.”

“Yes, and that’s the worst of all. Some of this looks like bits of Ladille or Aminese. These Ladille units—‘hours,’ ‘inches,’ ‘minutes’—they just make for awkward reading.”

Ezr had his own problems with the crazy Ladille units, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Reynolt. “I’m sure Trixia sees things that relate to her central translation the way Aminese and Ladille relate to the Nese you and I speak.”

Reynolt was silent for a long moment, vacantly staring. Sometimes that meant that the discussion was over, and she had just not bothered to dismiss him. Other times it meant that she was trying very hard to understand. “So you’re saying that she’s achieving a higher level of translation, giving us insight by trading on our own self-awareness.”

It was a typical Reynolt analysis, awkward and precise. “Yes! That’s it. You still want the translations with all the pointers and exceptions and caveats, since our understanding is still evolving. But the heart of good trading is having a gut feel for the other side’s needs and expectations.”

Reynolt had bought the explanation. In any case, Nau liked the simplifications, even the Ladille quaintness. As time passed, the other translators adopted more and more of Trixia’s conventions. Ezr doubted if any of the unFocused Emergents were really competent to judge the translations. And despite his own confident talk, Ezr wondered more and more: Trixia’s meta-trans of the Spiders was too much like the Dawn Age history he had pushed at her just before the ambush. That might seem alien to Nau and Brughel and Reynolt, but it was Ezr’s specialty and he saw too many suspicious coincidences.

Trixia consistently ignored the physical nature of the Spiders. Maybe this was just as well, considering the loathing that some humans felt for spiders. But the creatureswere radically nonhuman in appearance, more alien in form and life cycle than any intelligence yet encountered by Humankind. Some of their limbs had the function of human jaws, and they had nothing exactly like hands and fingers, instead using their large number of legs to manipulate objects. These differences were all but invisible in Trixia’s translations. There was an occasional reference to “a pointed hand” (perhaps the stiletto shape that a foreleg could fold into) or to midhands and forehands—but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen translations that were this soft, but those had been done by experts with decades of face-to-face experience with the Customer culture.

Children’s radio programming—at least that’s what Trixia thought it was—had been invented on the Spider world. She translated the show’s title as “The Children’s Hour of Science,” and currently it was their best source of insight about the Spiders. The radio show was an ideal combination of science language—which the humans had made good progress on—and the colloquial language of everyday culture. No one knew if it was really aimed at schooling children or simply entertaining them. Conceivably, it was remedial education for military conscripts. Yet Trixia’s title caught on, and that colored everything that followed with innocence and cuteness. Trixia’s Arachna seemed like something from a Dawn Age fairy tale. Sometimes when Ezr had spent a long day with her, when she had not spoken a word to him, when her Focus was so narrow that it denied all humanity… sometimes he wondered if these translations might be the Trixia of old, trapped in the most effective slavery of all time, and still reaching out for hope. The Spider world was the only place her Focus allowed her to gaze upon. May be she was distorting what she heard, creating a dream of happiness in the only way that was left to her.

NINETEEN

It was in the midphase of the sun, and Princeton had recovered much of its beauty. In the cooler times ahead, there would be much more construction, the open theaters, the Palace of the Waning Years, the University’s arboreta. But by 60//19, the street plan of generations past was fully in place, the central business section was complete, and the University held classes all the year round.

In other ways, the year 60//19 was different from 59//19, and very different from the tenth year of all generations before that. The world had entered the Age of Science. An airfield covered the river lowlands that had been farm paddies in past eras. Radio masts grew from the city’s highest hills; at night, their far-red marker lights could be seen for miles.

By 60//19 most of the Accord’s cities were similarly changed, as were the great cities of Tiefstadt and the Kindred, and to a lesser degree the cities of poorer nations. But even by the standards of the new age, Princeton was a very special place. There were things happening here that didn’t show on the visible landscape, yet were the seeds of greater revolution.

Hrunkner Unnerby flew in to Princeton one rainy spring morning. An airport taxi drove him from the riverfront up through the center of town. Unnerby had grown up in Princeton and his old construction company had been here. He arrived before most shops’ opening time; street cleaners scuttled this way and that around his taxi. A cool drizzle left the shops and the trees with glints of a thousand colors. Hrunkner liked the old downtown, where many of the stone foundations had survived more than three or four generations. Even the new concrete and the brick upper stories followed designs from before the time of any living person.

Out of the downtown, they climbed through new housing. This was a former Royal property that the government had sold to finance the Great War—the conflict the new generation was already calling simply the War with the Tiefers. Some parts of the new district were instant slums; others—the higher viewpoints—were elegant estates. The taxi trundled back and forth along the switchbacks, rising slowly toward the highest spot in the new tract. The top was obscured by dripping ferns, but here and there he glimpsed outbuildings. Gates opened silently and without apparent attendants. Hunh. There was a bloody palace up ahead.

Sherkaner Underhill stood by the parking circle at the end, looking quite out of place beside the grand entrance. The rain was just a comfortable mist, but Underhill popped open an umbrella as he walked out to greet Unnerby.

“Welcome, Sergeant! Welcome! All the years I’ve been after you to visit my little hillhouse, and finally you’re here.”

Hrunkner shrugged.

“I have so much to show you… starting with two small but important items.” He tipped back the umbrella. After a moment, two tiny heads peeked up from the fur on his back. The two were babies, holding tight to their father. They could be no older than normal children in the early Bright, just old enough to be cute. “The little girl is Rhapsa and the boy is Hrunkner.”

Unnerby stepped forward, trying to seem casual.They probably namedthe child Hrunkner out of friendship. God in deepest earth. “Very pleased to meet you.” In the best of times, Unnerby had no way with children—training new hires was the closest he’d ever come to raising them. Hopefully, that would excuse his unease.

The babies seemed to sense his distaste, and retreated shyly from sight. “

Never mind,” said Sherkaner, in that oblivious way of his. “They’ll come out and play once we’re indoors.”

Sherkaner led him inside, talking all the way about how much he had to show him, how good it was that Hrunkner was finally visiting. The years had changed Underhill, physically at least. Gone was the painful leanness; he had been through several molts. The fur on his back was deep and paternal, strange to see on anyone in this phase of the sun. The tremor in his head and forebody was a little worse than Unnerby remembered.

They walked through a foyer big enough for a hotel, and down a wide spiral of steps that looked out upon wing after wing of Sherkaner’s “little hillhouse.” There were plenty of other people here, servants perhaps, though they didn’t wear the livery that the super-rich usually demanded. In fact, the place had the utilitarian feel of corporate or government property. Unnerby interrupted the other’s nonstop chatter with, “This is all a front, isn’t it, Underhill? The King never sold this hill at all, just transferred it.” To the Intelligence Service.

“No, really. I do own the ground; I bought it myself. But, um, I do a lot of consulting, and Victory—I mean Accord Intelligence—decided that security was best served by setting up the labs right here. I have some things to show you.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s the point of my visit, Sherk. I don’t think you’re working on the right things. You’ve pushed the Crown into going all out for—I assume we can talk freely here?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

Ordinarily, Unnerby wouldn’t have accepted such a casual assertion, but he was beginning to realize how thoroughly secure the building was. There was plenty of Sherkaner design, the logarithmic spiral of the main rooms for instance, but there was also Victory’s touch, the—guards, he now realized—lurking everywhere, the crisply clean nature of the carpets and walls. This place was probably as safe as Unnerby’s labs inside Lands Command. “Okay. You’ve pushed the Crown into going all out for atomic power. I’m managing more men and equipment than a billionaire, including several people almost as smart as you are.” In fact, though Hrunkner Unnerby was still a sergeant, his job was about as far from that rank as one could get. His life these days was beyond his wildest contractor’s dream.

“Good, good. Victory has a lot of faith in you, you know.” He led his guest into a large and peculiar room. There were bookcases and a desk, all overflowing with reports, randomly piled books, and notepaper. But the bookcases were fastened to a cobblie jungle gym, and children’s books were mixed with the arcana. His two babies hopped from his back and scuttled up the gym. Now they peered down upon them from the ceiling. Sherkaner pushed books and magazines off a lower perch and waved for Unnerby to seat himself. Thank God he didn’t try to change the subject.

“Yeah, but you haven’t seen my reports.”

“Yes, I have. Victory sends them to me, though I haven’t had time to read them.”

“Well, maybe you should!” Deep Secret reports are sent to him and hedoesn’t have time to read them—and he’s the cobber who started it all. “Look, Sherkaner, I’m telling you it’s not working out. In principle, atomic power can do everything we need. In practice—well, we’ve made some really deadly poisons. There are things like radium but a lot easier to produce in bulk. We’ve also got one isotope of uranium that’s very hard to isolate, but I think if we do, we can make a hell of a bomb: we can give you the energy to keep a city warm through the Dark, but all in less than a second!”

“Excellent! That’s a start.”

“That excellent start may be as far as it gets. I’ve had three labs taken over by the bomb cobbers. Trouble is, this is peacetime; this technology is going to leak out, first to mining interests, then to foreign states. Can you imagine what will happen once the Kindred and the Old Tiefers and God knows who else starts making these things?”

That seemed to penetrate Underhill’s durable armor of inattention. “…Yes, that will be very bad. I haven’t read your reports, but Victory is up here often. Technology gives us wonders and terrible dangers. We can’t have one without the other. But I’m convinced we won’t survive unless we play with these things. You’re seeing just one part of it all. Look, I know Victory can get you more money. Accord Intelligence has a good credit rating. They can go beyond the tithe for a decade without having to show a profit. We’ll get you more labs, whatever you want—”

“Sherkaner, have you heard of ‘forcing the learning curve’?”

“Well, uh—” Clearly he had.

“Right now, if I had all the wealth in the world, I could give you a city heating unit, maybe. It would suffer catastrophic failure every few years, and even when it was working ‘properly,’ its transfer fluid—superheated steam, say—would be so radioactive that your city’s residents would all be dead before the Dark was even ten years old. Beyond a certain point, throwing more money and technicians at a problem just doesn’t help.”

Sherkaner didn’t answer immediately. Unnerby had the feeling that his attention was roaming around the top of the jungle gym, watching his two babies. This room was a truly bizarre combination of wealth, the old Underhill intellectual chaos, and the new Underhill paternity. Where the floor wasn’t piled with books and knickknacks, he could see plush carpet. The wall covering was one of those superexpensive delusional patterns. The windows were quartz-paned, extending all the way to the high ceiling. They were cranked open now. The smell of ferns in the cool morning floated in past wrought-iron trellises. There were electric lamps by Underhill’s desks and by the legholds of the bookcases, but they were all turned off now.

The only light was the green and near-red that filtered through the ferns. That was more than enough to read the titles on the nearest books. There were psychology, math, electronics, an occasional astronomy text—and lots of children’s storybooks. The books were stacked in low piles, filling most of the space between toys and equipment. And it wasn’t always clear which were Underhill’s toys and which were the children’s. Some of the stuff looked like travel souvenirs, perhaps from Victory’s military postings: a Tiefer leg polisher, dried flowers that might have been an Islander garland. And over in the corner… it looked like a Mark 7 artillery rocket, for God’s sake. The warhead hatch had been removed, and there was a dollhouse installed in place of the customary high explosives.

Finally Underhill said, “You’re right, money alone won’t make progress. It takes time to make the machines that make the machines, and so on. But we still have another twenty-five years or so, and the General tells me you are a genius at managing something this large.”

Hrunkner felt an old pride in hearing that, more pride than for all the medals he had collected in the Great War; but if it hadn’t been for Smith and Underhill, he never would have discovered he had such talents. He replied grumpily, careful not to give away how much such praise meant to him: “Thank you so much. But what I’m telling you is that none of that is enough. If you want this done in less than twenty years, I need something more.”

“Yes, what?”

“You, damn it! Your insight! Since the first year of the project, you’ve been hidden away up here in Princeton, doing God knows what.”

“Oh…. Look Hrunkner, I’m sorry. The atomic power stuff just isn’t very interesting to me anymore.”

Knowing Underhill for all these years, Unnerby should not have been surprised by the comment. Nevertheless, it made him want to chew on his hands. Here was a fellow who abandoned fields of endeavor before others even knew they existed. If he were simply a crank, there’d be no problem. As it was, sometimes Unnerby would have cheerfully killed the cobber.

“Yes,” continued Underhill, “you need more bright people. I’m working on that, you know; I have some things I want to show you. But even so,” he said, obliviously pouring fuel on the fire, “my intuition is that atomic power will turn out to be relatively easy, compared to the other challenges.”

“Such. As. What?”

Sherkaner laughed. “Such as raising children, for example.” He pointed at the antique pendulum clock on the side wall. “I thought the other cobblies would be here by now; maybe I should show you the institute first.” He got off his perch, began waving in that silly way parents do to small children. “Come down, come down. Rhapsa, stay off the clock!” Too late: the baby had scuttled off the gym, made a flying leap onto the pendulum, and slid all the way to the floor. “I’ve got so much junk here, I’m afraid something will fall on the babies and squash them.” The two ran across the floor, hopped into their appointed places in their father’s fur. They were scarcely bigger than woodsfairies.

Underhill had gotten his institute declared a division of Kingschool. The hillhouse contained a number of classrooms, each occupying an arc of the outside perimeter. And it wasn’t Crown funds that paid for most of it, at least according to Underhill. Much of the research was simply proprietary, paid for by companies that had been very impressed by Underhill. “I could have hired away some of Kingschool’s best, but we made a deal. Their people continue to teach and do research downtown, but they get time up here, with a percentage of our overhead getting fed back to Kingschool. And up here, what counts is results.”

“No classes?”

When Sherkaner shrugged, the two little ones bobbed up and down on his back and made excited littlemeeping, sounds that probably meant, “Do it again, Daddy!”

“Yes, we have classes… sort of. The main thing is, people get to talk to other people, across many specialties. Students take a risk because things are so unstructured. I’ve got a few who are having a good time, but who aren’t bright enough for this to work for them.”

Most of the classrooms had two or three persons at the blackboards, and a crowd watching from low perches. It was hard to tell who was the prof and who the student. In some cases, Hrunkner couldn’t even guess the field being discussed. They stopped for a moment by one door. A current-generation cobblie was lecturing a bunch of old cobbers. The blackboard scratching looked like a combination of celestial mechanics and electromagnetics. Sherkaner stopped, waved a smile at the people in the room. “You remember the aurora we saw in Dark? I have a fellow here who thinks that maybe it was caused by objects in space, things that are exceptionally dark.”

“They weren’t dark when we saw them.”

“Yes! Maybe they actually have something to do with the start of the New Sun. I have my doubts. Jaybert doesn’t know much celestial mechanics yet. Hedoes know E&M. He’s working on a wireless device that can radiate at wavelengths of just a few inches.”

“Huh? That sounds more like super far-red than radio.”

“It’s not something we could ever see, but it’s going to be neat. He wants to use it as an echo finder for his space rocks.”

They walked farther down the hall. He noticed that Underhill was suddenly silent, no doubt to give him time to think on the idea. Hrunkner Unnerby was a very practical fellow; he suspected that was the reason he was essential to some of General Smith’s wilder projects. But even he could be brought up short by an idea that was spectacular enough. He had only the vaguest notion how such short wavelengths would behave, though they should be highly directional. The power needed for echo detection would vary as the inverse fourth power of the range—they’d have effective ground uses for it before they ever had enough juice to go looking for rocks in outer space. Hmm. The military angle could be more important than anything this Jaybert was planning…. “Has anyonebuilt this high-frequency transmitter?”

His interest must have shown; Underhill was smiling more and more. “Yes, and that’s Jaybert’s real work of genius, something he calls a cavity oscillator. I’ve got a little antenna on the roof; it looks more like a telescope mirror than a radio mast. Victory installed a row of relays down the Westermost Range to Lands Command. I can talk to her as reliably as over the telephone cable. I’m using it as a test bed for one class’s crypto schemes. We’ll end up with the most secure, high-volume wireless you can imagine.”

Even if Jaybert’s stargazing never works out.Sherkaner Underhill was as crazy as ever, and Unnerby was beginning to see what he was getting at, why he refused to drop everything and work on atomic power. “You really think this school is going to produce the geniuses we need at Lands Command?”

“It’s going to find them, anyway—and I think we’re bringing out the best in what we find. I’ve never had more fun in my life. But you have to be flexible, Hrunk. The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.”

That was easy for Sherkaner Underhill to say. He didn’t have to engineer the science into reality.

Underhill had stopped at an empty classroom; he peeked in at the blackboards. More gobbledegook. “You remember the cam-and-gear devices that Lands Command used in the War, to figure ballistic tables? We’re making things like that with vacuum tubes and magnet cores. They’re a million times faster than the cam gadgets, and we can input the numbers as symbol strings instead of vernier settings. Your physicists will love it.” He chuckled. “You’ll see, Hrunk. Except for the fact that the inventions are first-patented by our sponsors, you and Victory will have more than enough to keep you happy….”

They continued up the long spiral stair. It opened finally onto an atrium near the top of the hill. There were higher hills around Princeton, but the view from here was spectacular enough, even in a cool drizzle. Unnerby could see a trimotor coming in at the airport. Tracts of late-phase development on the other side of the valley were the colors of wet granite and just-laid asphalt. Unnerby knew the company on that job. They had faith in the rumors that there would be power available to live long into the next Dark. What would Princeton be like if that were so? A city under the stars and hard vacuum, yet not asleep, and its deepnesses empty. The biggest risks would be late in the Waning Years, when people must decide whether to stock up for a conventional Dark, or gamble on what Hrunkner Unnerby’s engineers thought they could do. His nightmares were not of failure, but of partial success.

“Daddy, Daddy!” Two five-year-olds careered into sight behind them. They were followed by two more cobblies, but these looked almost big enough to be in-phase. For more than ten years, Hrunkner Unnerby had done his best to overlook his boss’s perversions: General Victory Smith was the best Intelligence chief he could imagine, probably even better than Strut Greenval. It shouldn’t matter what her personal habits were. It had certainly never bothered him that she was born out-of-phase herself; that was something a person had no control over. But that she would start a family at the beginning of a New Sun, that she would damn her own children as she had been damned… And they aren’t even all the same age.The two babies had hopped off Underhill’s back. They scuttled across the grass and up the legs of their two oldest siblings. It was almost as if Smith and Underhill had deliberately set out to smear offal in the eyes of society’s regard. This visit, so long avoided, was turning out to be just as bad as he’d feared.

The two oldest, both boys, hoisted the babies up, pretended for a moment to carry them like real fathers. They had no back fur, of course, and the babies slipped and slid down their carapaces. They grabbed hold of their brothers’ jackets and scrambled back up, their baby laughter loud.

Underhill introduced the four to the sergeant. They all trooped across the soggy grass to the protection of an awning. This was the biggest play area that Unnerby had ever seen outside a schoolyard, but it was also very strange. A proper school went through discrete grades, targeting the current age of the pupils. The equipment in Underhill’s play garden spanned a number of years. There were vertical gymnets, such as only a two-year-old could easily use. There were sandboxes, several huge dollhouses, and low play tables with picture books and games.

“Junior is the reason we didn’t meet you and Mr. Unnerby downstairs, Dad.” The twelve-year-old flicked a pointed hand in the direction of one of the five-year-olds—Victory Junior? “She wanted you up here, so we could show Mr. Unnerby all our toys.”

Five-year-olds are not very good at hiding their feelings. Victory Junior still had her baby eyes. Even though baby eyes could turn a few degrees, there were only two of them; she had to face almost directly toward whatever she wanted to observe. In a way that could never be true of an adult, it was easy to see where Junior’s attention was. Her two big eyes looked first at Underhill and Unnerby, then glanced toward her older brother. “Snitch!” she hissed at him. “You wanted them up here, too.” She flicked her eating hands at him, and sidled close to Underhill. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I wanted to show my dollhouse, and Brent and Gokna still had their lessons to finish.”

Underhill lifted his forearms to enclose her in a hug. “Well, we were going to come up here anyway.” And to Unnerby: “I’m afraid the General has made rather a big thing of you, Hrunkner.”

“Yeah, you’re an Engineer!” said the other five-year-old—Gokna?

Whatever Junior’s desires, Brent and Jirlib got to show off first. Their actual educational state was hard to estimate. The two had some kind of study curriculum, but were otherwise allowed to look into whatever they wished. Jirlib—the boy who had tattled on Junior—collected things. He seemed more deeply into fossils than any child Unnerby had ever seen. Jirlib had books from the Kingschool library that would have challenged adult students. He had a collection of diamond foraminiafera from trips with his parents down to Lands Command. And almost as much as his father, he was full of crazy theories. “We’re not the first, you know. A hundred million years ago, just under the diamond strata, there are the Distorts of Khelm. Most scientists think they were dumb animals, but they weren’t. They had a magic civilization, and I’m going to figure out how it worked.” Actually, that was not new craziness, but Unnerby was a little surprised that Sherkaner let his children read Khelm’s crank paleontology.

Brent, the other twelve-year-old, was more like the stereotype of an out-of-phase child: withdrawn, a little bit sullen, perhaps retarded. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands and feet, and though he had plenty of eyes, he favored his foreview as though he were still much younger. Brent didn’t seem to have any special interests except for what he called “Daddy’s tests.” He had bags of buildertoys, shiny metal dowels and connector hubs. Three or four of the tables were covered by elaborate dowel and connector structures. By clever variation of the number of dowels per hub, someone had constructed various curved surfaces for the child. “I’ve thought a lot about Daddy’s tests. I’m getting better and better.” He began fiddling with a large torus, breaking up the carefully built framework.

“Tests?” Unnerby waved a glare at Sherkaner. “What are you doing with these children?”

Underhill didn’t seem to hear the anger in his voice. “Aren’t children wonderful—I mean, when they aren’t a pain in the ass. Watching a baby grow up, you can see the mechanisms of thought grow into place, stage by stage.” He slipped a hand gently across his back, petting the two babies, who had returned to safe haven. “In some ways, these two are less intelligent than a jungle tarant. There are patterns of thought that just don’t exist in babies. When I play with them, I can almost feel the barriers. But as the years pass, the minds grow; methods are added.” Underhill walked along the play tables as he spoke. One of the five-year-olds—Gokna—danced half a pace in front of him, mimicking his gestures, even to the tremor. He stopped at a table covered with beautiful blown-glass bottles, a dozen shapes and tints. Several were filled with fruitwater and ice, as if for some bizarre lawn party. “But even the five-year-olds have mental blinders. They have good language skills, but they’re still missing basic concepts—”

“And it’s not just that we don’t understand sex!” said Gokna.

For once, Underhill looked a little embarrassed. “She’s heard this speech too many times, I fear. And by now her brothers have told her what to say when we play question games.”

Gokna pulled on his leg. “Sit down and play. I want to show Mr. Unnerby what we do.”

“Okay. We can do that—where is your sister?” His voice was suddenly sharp and loud. “Viki! You get down from there! It’s not safe for you.”

Victory Junior was on the babies’ gymnet, scuttling back and forth just below the awning. “Oh, it is safe, Daddy. Now that you’re here!”

“No it’s not! You come down right now.”

Junior’s descent was accompanied by much loud grumbling, but within a few minutes she was showing off in another way.

One by one, they showed him all their projects. The two oldest had parts in a national radio program, explaining science for young people. Apparently Sherkaner was producing the show, for reasons that remained murky.

Hrunkner put up with it all, smiling and laughing and pretending. And each one was a wonderful child. With the exception of Brent, each was brighter and more open than almost any Unnerby remembered. All that made it even worse when he imagined what life would be like for them once they had to face the outside world.

Victory Junior had a dollhouse, a huge thing that extended back a little way into the ferns. When her turn came, she hooked two hands under one of Hrunkner’s forearms and almost dragged him over to the open face of her house.

“See,” she said, pointing to a hole in the toy basement. It looked suspiciously like the entrance to a termite nest. “My house even has its own deepness. And a pantry, and a dining hall, and seven bedrooms…” Each room had to be displayed to her guest, and all the furniture explained. She opened a bedroom wall, and there was a flurry of activity within. “And I even have little people to live in my house. See the attercops.” In fact, the scale of Viki’s house was almost perfect for the little creatures, at least in this phase of the sun. Eventually, their middle legs would become colored wings. They would be woodsfairies, and they wouldn’t fit at all. But for the moment, they did look like little people, scurrying to and fro between the inner rooms.

“They like me a lot. They can go back to the trees whenever they want, but I put little pieces of food in the rooms and they come every day to visit.” She pulled at little brass handles and a part of one floor came out like a drawer from a cabinet. Inside was an intricate maze built of flimsy wood partitions. “I even experiment with them, like Daddy plays with us, except a lot simpler.” Her baby eyes were both looking down so she couldn’t see Unnerby’s reaction. “I put honeydrip near this exit, then let them in at the other end. Then I time how long it takes…. Oh, you are lost, aren’t you, little one? You’ve been here two hours now. I’m sorry.” She reached an eating hand undaintily into the box and gently moved the attercop to a ledge by the ferns. “Heh, heh,” a very Sherkanish chuckle, “some of them are a lot dumber than others—or maybe it’s luck. Now, how do I count her time, when she never got through the maze at all?”

“I… don’t know.”

She turned to face him, her beautiful eyes looking up at him. “Mommy says my little brother is named after you. Hrunkner?”

“Yes. I guess that’s right.”

“Mommy says that you are the best engineer in the world. She says you can make even Daddy’s crazy ideas come true. Mommy wants you to like us.”

There was something about a child’s gaze. It was sodirected. There was no way the target could pretend that he wasn’t the one regarded. All the embarrassment and pain of the visit seemed to come together in that one moment. “I like you,” he said.

Victory Junior look at him for a moment more, and then her gaze slid away. “Okay.”

They had lunch with the cobblies up in the atrium. The cloud cover was burning off, and things were getting hot, at least for a Princeton spring day in the nineteenth year. Even under the awning it was warm enough to start sweat from every joint. The children didn’t seem to mind. They were still taken by the stranger who had given their baby brother his name. Except for Viki, they were as raucous as ever, and Unnerby did his best to respond.

As they were finishing, the children’s tutors showed up. They looked like students from the institute. The children would never have to go to a real school. Would that make it any easier for them in the end?

The children wanted Unnerby to stay for their lessons, but Sherkaner would have none of it. “Concentrate on studying,” he said.

And so—hopefully—the hardest part of the visit was past. Except for the babies, Underhill and Unnerby were alone back in his study in the cool ground floor of the institute. They talked for a while about Unnerby’s specific needs. Even if Sherkaner was unwilling to help directly, he really did have some bright cobbers up here. “I’d like you to talk to some of my theory people. And I want you to see our computing-machinery experts. It seems to me that some of your grunt problems would be solved if you just had fast methods for solving differential equations.”

Underhill stretched out on the perch behind his desk. His aspect was suddenly quizzical. “Hrunk… socializing aside, we accomplished more today than a dozen phone calls could have done. I know the institute is a place you’d love. Not that you’d fit in! We have plenty of technicians, but our theory people think they can boss them around. You’re in a different class. You’re the type that can boss the thinkers around and use what ideas they have to reach your engineering goals.”

Hrunkner smiled weakly. “I thought invention was to be the parent of necessity?”

“Hmf. It mainly is. That’s why we need people like you, who can bend the pieces together. You’ll see what I mean this afternoon. These are people you’d love to take advantage of, and vice versa…. I just wish you had come up a lot earlier.”

Unnerby started to make some weak excuse, stopped. He just couldn’t pretend anymore. Besides, Sherkaner was so much easier to face than the General. “You know why I didn’t come before, Sherk. In fact, I wouldn’t be here now if General Smith hadn’t given me explicit orders. I’d follow her through Hell, you know that. But she wants more. She wants acceptance of your perversions. I—You two have such beautiful children, Sherk. How could you do such a thing to them?”

He expected the other to laugh the question off, or perhaps to react with the icy hostility that Smith showed at any hint of such criticism. Instead, Underhill sat silently for a moment, playing with an antique children’s puzzle. The little wood pieces clicked back and forth in the quiet of the study. “You agree the children are healthy and happy?”

“Yes, though Brent seems… slow.”

“You don’t think I regard them as experimental animals?”

Unnerby thought back to Victory Junior and her dollhouse maze. Why when he was her age, he used to fry attercops with a magnifying glass. “Um, you experiment with everything, Sherk; that’s just the way you are. I think you love your children as much as any good father. And that’s why it’s all the harder for me to imagine how you could bring them into the world out of phase. So what if only one was mentally damaged? I notice they didn’t talk of having any contemporary playmates. You can’t find any who aren’t monstrous, can you?”

From Sherkaner’s aspect, he could tell his question had a struck home. “Sherk. Your poor children will live their whole lives in a society that sees them as a crime against nature.”

“We’re working on these things, Hrunkner. Jirlib told you about ‘The Children’s Hour of Science,’ didn’t he?”

“I wondered what that was all about. So he and Brent are really on a radio show? Those two could almost pass for in-phase, but in the long run somebody will guess and—”

“Of course. If not, Victory Junior is eager to be on the show. Eventually, Iwant the audience to understand. The program is going to cover all sorts of science topics, but there will be a continuing thread about biology and evolution and how the Dark has caused us to live our lives in certain ways. With the rise of technology, whatever social reason there is for rigid birthing times is irrelevant.”

“You’ll never convince the Church of the Dark.”

“That’s okay. I’m hoping to convince the millions of open-minded people like Hrunkner Unnerby.”

Unnerby couldn’t think what to say. The other’s argument was all so glib. Didn’t Underhill understand? All decent societies agreed on basic issues, things that meant the healthy survival of their people. Things might be changing, but it was self-serving nonsense to throw the rules overboard. Even if they lived in the Dark, there would still be a need for decent cycles of life…. The silence stretched out. There was just the clicking of Sherk’s little puzzle blocks.

Finally, Sherkaner spoke. “The General likes you very much, Hrunk. You were her dearest cobber-in-arms—but more, you were decent to her when she was a new lieutenant and it looked like her career would end on the trash pile.”

“She’s the best. She couldn’t help when she was born.”

“…Granted. But that’s also why she’s been making your life so hard lately. She thought that you, of all people, would accept what she and I are doing.”

“I know, Sherk, but Ican’t. You saw me today. I did my best, but your cobblies saw through me. Junior did anyway.”

“Heh, heh. She did indeed. It’s not just her name; Little Victory is smart like her mother. But—as you say—she’s going to have to face much worse…. Look, Hrunk. I’m going to have a little chat with the General. She should accept what she can get, learn a little tolerance—even if it is tolerance for your intolerance.”

“I—that would help, Sherk. Thanks.”

“In the meantime, we’ll need you up here more often. But you can come on your own terms. The children would like to see you, but at whatever distance you prefer.”

“Okay. I do like them. I’m just afraid I can’t be what they want.”

“Ha. Then finding the right distance will be their little experiment.” He smiled. “They can be pretty flexible if they look at you that way.”

TWENTY

In Pre-Flight, Pham Trinli had been a distant curiosity to Ezr Vinh. What little he had seen of the guy seemed sullen, lazy, and probably incompetent. He was “somebody’s relative”; it was the only explanation for how he had made the crew. It was only since the ambush that Trinli’s boorish, loudmouth behavior had made its impact on Ezr. Occasionally he was amusing; much more often he was loathsome. Trinli’s Watch time overlapped Ezr’s by sixty percent. When he went over to Hammerfest, there was Pham Trinli trading dirty stories with Reynolt’s techs. When he visited Benny’s booze parlor, there was Trinli with a gang of Emergents, loud and pompous as ever. It had been years—really since Jimmy Diem died—since anyone would think his behavior traitorous. Qeng Ho and Emergents had to get along, and there were plenty of Traders in Trinli’s circle.

Today Ezr’s loathing for the man had changed to something darker. It was the once-per-Msec Watch-manager meeting, chaired as always by Tomas Nau. This was not the empty propaganda of Ezr’s fake “Fleet Management Committee.” The expertise of both sides was needed if they were to survive here. And though there was never a question of who was boss, Nau actually heeded much of the advice given at these meetings. Ritser Brughel was currently off-Watch, so this meeting would proceed without pathological overtones. With the exception of Pham Trinli, the managers were people who really could make things work.

All had gone smoothly through the first Ksec. Kal Omo’s programmers had sanitized a batch of head-up displays for Qeng Ho use. The new interface was limited, but better than nothing. Anne Reynolt had a new Focused roster. The full schedule was still a secret, but it looked like Trixia might get more time off. Gonle Fong proposed some Watch changes. Ezr knew were these were secret payoffs for various deals she had on the side, but Nau blandly accepted them. The underground economy she and Benny had masterminded was surely known to Tomas Nau… but the years had passed and he had consistently ignored it.And he has consistently benefitedby it. Ezr Vinh would never have thought that free trading could add much efficiency in such a small and closed society as this little camp at L1, but it clearly had improved life. Most people had their favored Watch companions. Many had Qiwi Lisolet’s little bonsai bubbles in their rooms. Equipment allocation was about as slick as it could be. Maybe it just showed how screwed up the original Emergent allocation system had been. Ezr still clung to the secret belief that Tomas Nau was the deepest villain he had ever known, a mass murderer, who murdered simply to advance a lie. But he was so clever, so outwardly conciliatory. Tomas Nau was more than smart enough to allow this underground trade that helped him to proceed.

“Very well, last item.” He smiled down the length of the table. “As usual, the most interesting and difficult item. Qiwi?”

Qiwi Lisolet rose smoothly, stopped herself with a hand on the low ceiling. Gravity existed on Hammerfest, but it was barely good enough to keep the drinking bulbs on the table. “Interesting? I guess.” She made a face. “But it’s also a very irritating problem.” Qiwi opened a deep pocket and pulled out a bundle of head-up displays—all tagged with “cleared-for-Peddler-use” seals. “Let’s try out Kal Omo’s toys.” She passed them out to the various Watch managers. Ezr took one, smiled back at her shy grin. Qiwi was still child-short, but she was as compact and nearly as tall as an average Strentmannian adult. She was no longer a little girl, or even the devastated orphan of the Relighting. Qiwi had lived Watch-on-Watch in the years after the Relight; she had aged a full year for every year that passed. Since OnOff’s light had faded to a more manageable level, she’d had some time off-Watch, but Ezr could see tiny creases beginning at the corners of her eyes.She’s what now? Older than I am. The old playfulness sometimes showed even still, but she never teased Ezr anymore. And he knew the stories about Qiwi and Tomas Nau were true. Poor, damned Qiwi.

But Qiwi Lin Lisolet had become something more than Ezr ever expected. Now Qiwi balanced mountains.

She waited until they all were wearing their huds. Then: “You know I manage our halo-orbit around L1.” Above the middle of the table, the rockpile suddenly materialized. A tiny Hammerfest stuck out of the jumble on Ezr’s side; a taxi was just mooring on the high tower. The image was crisp, cutting precisely across the wall and people behind it. But when he turned his head quickly from the rockpile to Qiwi and back, the pile blurred slightly. The placement automation couldn’t quite keep up with the motion, and the visual fraud failed. No doubt, Kal Omo’s programmers had been forced to replace some of the optimizations. Still, what was left was close to Qeng Ho quality, the images separately coordinated in the field of each head-up display.

Dozens of tiny red lights appeared across the surface of the rockpile. “Those are the electric-jet emplacements”—and then even more yellow spots of light—“and that is the sensor grid.” She laughed, as light and playful as he remembered. “Altogether it looks like a finite element solution grid, doesn’t it? But then, that’s just what it is, though the grid points are real machines collecting data. Anyway, my people and I have two problems. Either one of them is fairly easy: We need to keep the jumble in orbit around L1.” The jumble shrank to a stylized symbol, tracing an everchanging Lissajous figure around the glyphL1. On one side hung Arachna; far away but on the same line was the OnOff star. “We have it set so we’re always near the sun’s limb as seen by the Spiders. It will be many years before they have the technology to detect us here…. But the other goal of the stabilization is to keep Hammerfest and the remaining blocks of ocean ice and airsnow all in the shadow.” Back to the original view of the jumble, but now the volatiles were marked in blue and green. Every year that precious resource shrank, consumed by the humans and by evaporation into space. “Unfortunately these two goals are somewhat inconsistent. The rubble pile isloose. Sometimes our L1 stationkeeping causes torques and the rocks slide.”

“The rubble quakes,” said Jau Xin.

“Yes. Down here at Hammerfest, you feel them all the time. Without constant supervision, the problem would be worse.” The surface of the meeting table became a model of the juncture of Diamonds One and Two. Qiwi motioned across the blocks and a forty-centimeter swath of surface turned pink. “That’s a shift that almost got away from us. But we can’t afford the human resources to—”

Pham Trinli had sat through all this in silence, his eyes squinted down in a look of angry concentration. As Nau’s original choice to manage the stabilization, Trinli had a long history of humiliation on this subject. Finally he exploded. “Crap. I thought you were going to spend some of the water, melt it into a glue you could inject between the Diamonds.”

“We did that. It helps some, but—”

“But you still can’t keep things settled, can you?” Trinli turned to Nau, and half rose from his chair. “Podmaster, I’ve told you before that I’m best for the job. The Lisolet girl knows how to run a dynamics program, and she works as hard as anyone—but she doesn’t have any depth of experience.” Depth of experience? How many years of hands-on does she need, old man?

But Nau just smiled at Trinli. No matter how absurd the idiot’s contentions, Nau always invited him back. For a long time, Ezr had suspected it was some sadistic humor on the Podmaster’s part.

“Well, then perhaps I should give you the job, Armsman. But consider, even now it would mean at least one-third time on-Watch.” Nau’s tone was courteous, but Trinli caught the dare in it. Ezr could just see the anger growing in the old man.

“One-third?” said Trinli. “I could do it on a one-fifth Watch, even if the other crewmembers were novices. No matter how cleverly the jets are emplaced, success comes down to the quality of the guidance network. Miss Lisolet doesn’t understand all the features of the localizer devices she is using.”

“Explain,” said Anne Reynolt. “A localizer is a localizer. We’ve been using both ours and yours in this project.” Localizers were a basic tool of any technical civilization. The tiny devices chirped their impulse codes at one another, using time of flight and distributed algorithms to accurately locate each participating device. Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile. Together they were a kind of low-level network, providing information on the orientation, position, and relative velocity of the electric jets and the rubble.

“Not so.” Trinli smiled patronizingly. “Ours work with yours well enough, but at the price of degrading their natural performance. Here’s what the units look like.” The old man fiddled with his hand pad. “Miss Lisolet, these interfaces are worthless.”

“Allow me,” said Nau. He spoke into the air, “here are the two types of localizers we’re using.”

The landscape vanished, and two pieces of vacuum-rated electronics appeared on the table. No matter how often Ezr saw this sort of demonstration, it was hard to get used to. In a practiced presentation, with a predetermined display sequence, it was easy to use voice recognition to guide things. What Nau had just done was subtly beyond any Qeng Ho interface. Somewhere up in Hammerfest’s attic, one or more of his ziphead slaves was listening to every word spoken here, giving context to Nau’s words and mapping them through to the fleet’s automation or other ziphead specialists. And here were the resulting images, as quick as if Nau’s own mind contained the fleet’s entire database.

Of course, Pham Trinli was oblivious to the magic. “Right.” He leaned closer to the equipment. “Except that these are really more than the localizers themselves.”

Qiwi: “I don’t understand. We need a power supply, the sensor probes.”

Trinli grinned at her, triumph dripping in his smile. “That’s what you think—and perhaps it was true in the early years when ol’ OnOff was frying everything. But now—” He reached closer and his finger disappeared into the side of the smaller package. “Can you show the localizer core, Podmaster?”

Nau nodded. “Right.” And the image of the Qeng Ho package was cut away, component layer by component layer. In the end, all that was left was a tiny blackened fleck, not more than a millimeter across.

Sitting next to him, Ezr caught an instant of tension in Tomas Nau. The other was suddenly, intensely interested. The moment passed before Ezr was even sure it existed. “My, that is small. Let’s take a closer look.”

The dustmote image swelled until it was a meter across and almost forty centimeters high. The head-up display automation painted appropriate reflections and shadows.

“Thanks.” Trinli stood so they could all see him over the top of the lens-shaped gadget. “This is the basic Qeng Ho localizer—normally embedded in protective barriers, and so on. But see, in a benign environment—even outside in the shade—it is quite self-sufficient.”

“Power?” said Reynolt.

Trinli waved his hand dismissively. “Just pulse them with microwaves, maybe a dozen times a second. I don’t know the details, but I’ve seen them used in much larger numbers on some projects. I’m sure that would give finer control. As for sensors, these puppies have several simple things built in—temperature, light levels, sonics.”

Jau Xin: “But how could Qiwi and the rest be ignorant of all this?”

Ezr could see where it was all going, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

Trinli shrugged magnanimously. He still did not realize how far his ego had taken him. “As I’ve been saying all along: Qiwi Lin Lisolet is young and inexperienced. Coarse-grain localizers are good enough for most projects. Besides, the advanced characteristics are most useful in military work, and I wager that the texts she studies are deliberately vague on those issues. I, on the other hand, have worked as both an engineer and an armsman. Though it’s not permitted normally, the localizers are an excellent oversight facility.”

“Certainly,” Nau said, looking thoughtful. “Localizers and attached sensors are the heart of proper security.” And these dustmotes already had sensors and independence built in. They weren’t an embedded component of a system; they could be the system itself.

“What do you think, Qiwi? Would a slew of these make things simpler for you?”

“Maybe. This is all news to me; I never thought a tech book would lie to me.” She thought a moment. “But yes, if we had lots more localizers and the processing power scales properly fitted, then we could probably cut back on the human supervision.”

“Very well. I want you to get the details from Armsman Trinli, and install an extended network.”

“I’ll be glad to take over the job, Podmaster,” said Trinli.

But Nau was no fool. He shook his head. “No, you’re much more valuable in your overall supervisory role. In fact, I want you and Anne to chat about this. When he comes on-Watch, Ritser will be interested, too. There should be a number of public safety applications for these gadgets.”

So Pham Trinli had handed the Emergents even better manacles and chains. For an instant something like chagrined understanding flickered across the old man’s face.

Ezr did his best not to talk to anyone for the rest of the day. He had never imagined that he could hate a stupid clown so much. Pham Trinli was no mass murderer, and his devious nature was written large across his every foolish move. But his stupidity had betrayed a secret the enemy had never guessed, a secret that Ezr himself had never known, a secret that others must have taken to their deaths rather than give to Tomas Nau and Ritser Brughel.

Before, he had thought that Nau kept Trinli around for laughs. Now Ezr knew better. And not since that long-ago night in the temp park had Ezr felt so coldly murderous. If there ever came a time when Pham Trinli could have a fatal accident…

After second mess, Ezr stayed in his quarters. His behavior shouldn’t be suspicious. The live-music people took over Benny’s every day about this time, and jamming was one Qeng Ho custom that Ezr had never enjoyed, even as a listener. Besides, there was plenty of work to catch up on. Some of it didn’t even require that he talk to others. He slipped on the new head-up display, and looked at the Fleet Library.

In some sense, the survival of the Fleet Library was Captain Park’s greatest failure. Every fleet had elaborate precautions for destroying critical parts of their local library if capture was imminent. Such schemes couldn’t be complete. Libraries existed in a distributed form across the ships of their fleet. Pieces would be cached in a thousand nodes depending on the usage of the moment. Individual chips—those damnable localizers—contained extensive maintenance and operations manuals. Yet major databases should have been zeroed in very short order. What was left would have some usefulness, but the capital insights, the terabytes of hard experimental data would be gone—or left only as hardware instantiations, understandable only by painstaking reverse engineering. Somehow that destruction had not happened, even when it was obvious that the Emergent ambush would overwhelm all the ships of Park’s fleet. Or maybe Park had acted and there had been off-net nodes or backups that—contrary to all policy—had contained full copies of the library.

Tomas Nau knew a treasure when he saw it. Anne Reynolt’s slaves were dissecting the thing with the inhuman precision of the Focused. Sooner or later, they would know every Trader secret. But that would take years; zipheads didn’t know where to start. So Nau was using various unFocused staff to wander about the library and report on the big picture. Ezr had spent Msecs at it so far. It was a dicey job, because he had to produce some good results… and at the same time he tried subtly to guide their research away from things that might be immediately useful. He knew he might slip up, and eventually Nau would sense the lack of cooperation. The monster was subtle; more than once Ezr wondered who was using whom.

But today… Pham Trinli had just given away so much.

Ezr forced calmness on himself.Just look at the library. Write somesilly report. That would count as duty time and he wouldn’t have to freak out in any visible way. He played with the hand control that came with the new, “sanitized” head-up display. At least it recognized the simpler command chords: the huds seamlessly replaced his natural vision of his cabin with a view of the library’s entry layer. As he looked around, the automation tracked his head motion and the images slid past almost as smoothly as if the documents were real objects floating in his room. But… he fiddled with the control. Damn. Almost no customization was possible. They had gutted the interface, or changed it to some Emergent standard. This wasn’t much better than ordinary wallpaper!

He reached up to pull the thing from his face, to crumple it.Calmdown. He was still too ticked by Trinli’s screwup. Besides, this really was an improvement over wall displays. He smiled for a moment, remembering Gonle Fong’s obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards.

So what to look at today? Something that would seem natural to Nau, but couldn’t give them any more than they already had. Ah, yes, Trinli’s super localizers. They’d be sitting in an out-of-the-way niche in some secure section. He followed a couple of threads, the obvious directions. This was a view of the library that no mere apprentice would have. Nau had obtained—in ways that Ezr imagined, and still gave him nightmares—top-level passwords and security parameters. Now Ezr had the same view that Captain Park himself could have had.

No luck. The pointers showed the localizers clearly. Their small size was not really a secret, but even their incidentals manifest did not show them as carrying sensors. The on-chip manuals were just as innocent of strange features.Hunh. So Trinli was claiming there were trapdoors in the manuals that were invisible even in a captain’s view of the library?

The anger that had been churning his guts was momentarily forgotten. Ezr stared out at the data lands ranged around him, feeling suddenly relieved. Tomas Nau would see nothing strange in this situation. Except for Ezr Vinh, there might not be a single surviving Trader who would realize how absurd Trinli’s story must be.

But Ezr Vinh had grown up in the heart of a great trading Family. As a child he had sat at the dinner table, listening to discussions of fleet strategies as they were really practiced. A Captain’s level of access to his fleet library did not normally admit of further hidden features. Things—as always—could be lost; legacy applications were often so old that the search engines couldn’t find relevance. But short of sabotage or a customizing, nonstandard Captain, there should be no isolated secrets. In the long run, such measures were simply too painful for the system maintainers.

Ezr would have laughed, except he suspected that these sanitized huds were reporting every sound he made back to Brughel’s zipheads. Yet this was the first happy thought of the day.Trinli was bullshitting us! The old fraud bluffed about a lot of things, but he was usually careful with Tomas Nau. When it came time to give Reynolt the details, Trinli would scrounge in the chip manuals… and come up empty-handed. Somehow Ezr couldn’t feel much sympathy for him; for once the old bastard would get what he deserved.

TWENTY-ONE

Qiwi Lin Lisolet spent a lot of time out-of-doors. Maybe with the localizer gimmick Old Trinli was promising, that would change. Qiwi floated low across the old Diamond One/Two contact edge. Now it was in sunlight, the volatiles of the earlier years moved or boiled away. Where it was undisturbed, the surface of the diamond was gray and dull and smooth, almost opalescent. The sunlight eventually burned the top millimeter or so into graphite, kind of a micro-regolith, disguising the glitter below. Every ten meters along the edge there was a rainbow glint, where a sensor was set. The ejet emplacements extended off on either side. Even this close, you could scarcely see the activity, but Qiwi knew her gear: the electric jets sputtered in millisecond bursts, guided by the programs that listened to her sensors. And even that wasn’t delicate enough. Qiwi spent more than two thirds of her duty time floating around the rockpile, adjusting the ejets—and still the rock quakes were dangerously large. With a finer sensor net and the programs that Trinli was claiming, it should be easy to design better firing regimes. Then there would be millions of quakes, but so small no one would notice. And then she wouldn’t have to be here so much of the time. Qiwi wondered what it would be like to be on a low-duty cycle Watch schedule like most people. It would save medical resources, but it would also leave poor Tomas even more alone.

Her mind slid around the worry.There are things you can cure andthings you can’t; be grateful for what Trinli’s localizers will make right. She floated up from the cleft, and checked with the rest of her maintenance crew.

“Just the usual problems,” Floria Peres’s voice sounded in her ear. Floria was coasting over the “upper slopes” of Diamond Three. That was above the rockpile’s current zero-surface. They lost a few jets there every year. “Three loosened mountings… we caught them in time.”

“Very good. I’ll put Arn and Dima on it. I think we’re done early.” She smiled to herself. Plenty of time for the more interesting projects. She switched her comm away from her crew’s public sequency. “Hey, Floria. You’re in charge of the distillery this Watch, true?”

“Sure.” There was a chuckle in the other’s voice. “I try to get that job every time; working for you is just one of the unavoidable chores that come along with it.”

“Well, I have some things for you. Maybe we can deal?”

“Oh, maybe.” Floria was on a mere ten-percent duty cycle; even so, this was a dance they had been through before. Besides, she was Qeng Ho. “Meet me down at the distillery in a couple of thousand seconds. We can have tea.”

The volatiles distillery sat at the end of its slow trek across the dark side of the rockpile. Its towers and retorts glistened with frost in the Arachna-light; in other places, it glowed with dull red heat where fractionation and recombination occurred. What came out was the simple stock materials for their factory and the organic sludges for the bactries. The core of the L1 distillery was from the Qeng Ho fleet. The Emergents had brought along similar equipment, but it had been lost in the fighting.Thank goodness it was ours that survived. The repairs and new construction had forced them to scavenge from all the ships. If the distillery core had been Emergent technology, they’d’ve been lucky to have anything working now.

Qiwi tied down her taxi a few meters from the distillery. She unloaded her thermal-wrapped cargo, and pulled herself along the guide ropes toward the entrance. Around her lay the sweeping drifts of their remaining hoard of volatiles: airsnow and ocean ice from the surface of Arachna. Those had come a long way, and cost a lot. Much of the original mass, especially the airsnow, had been lost in the Relight and chance illuminations since. The remainder had been pushed and balanced into the safest shadows, had been melted in a vain attempt to glue the rockpile together, had been used to breathe and eat and live. Tomas had plans to hollow out portions of Diamond One as a really secure capture cave. Maybe that wouldn’t be necessary. As the sun slowly dimmed, it should be easier to save what was left. Meantime, the distillery made its slow progress—less than ten meters per year—through the drifts of ice and air. Behind, it left starglint on raw diamond, and a track of anchor holes.

Floria’s control cubby was at the base of the distillery’s rearmost towers. As part of the original Qeng Ho module, it had been nothing more than a pressurized hutch to eat and nap in. Over the years of the Exile, its various occupants had added to it. Coming in on it from ground level… Qiwi paused a moment. Most of her life was spent either in close-in rooms and tunnels, or in open emptiness. Floria’s latest changes made this something in between. She could imagine what Ezr would say of this: It really did look like a little cabin, almost like the fairy-tale pictures of how a farmer might live in the snow-covered foothills of an ancient land, close to a glistening forest.

Qiwi climbed past the outriggers and anchor cables—the edge of the magic forest—and knocked on the cabin door.

Trading was always fun. She had tried so many times to explain that to Tomas. The poor fellow had a good heart, but he came from a culture that just could not understand.

Qiwi brought partial payment for Floria’s most recent output: inside the thermal wrap was a twenty-centimeter bonsai, something Papa had worked Msecs to build. Micro-dwarf ferns grew out into multiple canopies. Floria held the bonsai bubble close to the room’s overhead light and looked up through the green. “The midges!”—submillimeter bugs. “They have colored wings!”

Qiwi had followed her friend’s reaction with carefully pretended neutrality, but now she couldn’t help herself, and she laughed. “I wondered if you would notice.” The bonsai was smaller than Papa’s usual, but it might be the most beautiful yet, better than anything Qiwi had ever seen in the library. She reached into the thermal wrap and brought out the other part of the payment. “And this is from Gonle, personally. It’s a clasp stand for the bonsai.”

“It’s… wood.” Floria had been charmed by the bonsai. Her reaction to the wood plate was more like amazement. She reached out to slide her fingers across the polished grain.

“We can make it by the tonne lot now, kind of a reverse dry rot. Of course, since Gonle grows it in vats, it looks a little strange.” The stripes and whorls were biowaves caught in the grain of the wood. “We’d need more space and time to get real rings.” Or maybe not; Papa thought he might be able to trick the biowaves into faking growth rings.

“Doesn’t matter.” Floria’s voice was abstracted. “Gonle has won her bet… or your father has won it for her. Imagine. Real wood in quantity, not just twigs in a bonsai bubble, or brush in the temp’s park.” She looked at Qiwi’s grinning face. “And I bet she figures this more than pays for past deals.”

“Well… we hoped it would soften you up.” They sat down, and Floria brought out the tea she had promised, from Gonle Fong’s agris and before that from the mounds of volatiles and diamond that surrounded the distillery. The two of them worked through the list that Benny and Gonle had put together. The list was not just their orders, but the result of the brokering that went on day after day up in Benny’s parlor. There were items here that were mainly for Emergent use. Lord, there were items in here that Tomas could have simply demanded, and that Ritser Brughel would certainly have demanded.

Floria’s objections were a catalogue of technical problems, things she would need before she could undertake what was asked of the distillery. She would get all she could out of these deals, but in fact what was being asked of her was technically difficult. Once, in pre-Flight when Qiwi couldn’t have been more than seven years old, Papa had taken her to a distillery at Triland. “This is what feeds the bactries, Qiwi, just as the bactries support the parks. Each layer is more wonderful than the one below it, but making even the lowliest distillery is a kind of art.” Ali loved his high end of the job above all others, but he still respected those others. Floria Peres was a talented chemist, and the dead goo she made was a marvelous creation.

Four thousand seconds later, they had agreed on a web of perks and favors for the rest of Floria’s Watch. They sat for a time, sipping a new batch of tea and idly discussing what they might try after the current goals were accomplished. Qiwi told her Trinli’s claims about the localizers.

“That’s good news, if the old fart isn’t lying. Maybe now you won’t have to live at such a high duty cycle.” Floria looked across at Qiwi, and there was a strange, sad expression in her eyes. “You were a little girl, and now you’re older than I am. You shouldn’t have to burn your life out, child, just to keep a bunch of rocks lined up.”

“It—It’s not that bad. It needs to be done, even if we don’t have the best medical support.” Besides, Tomas is always on Watch and he needsmy help. “And there are advantages to being up most of the time. I get into almost everything. I know where there are deals to be made, goodies to be scrounged. It makes me a better Trader.”

“Hmm.” Floria looked away, and then abruptly back. “This isn’t trading! It’s a silly game!” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry, Qiwi. You can’t really know… but I know what trade is really like. I’ve been to Kielle. I’ve been to Canberra. This,” she waved her hand, as if to encompass all of L1—“this is just pretend. You know why I always ask for this distillery job? I’ve made this control cubby into something like a home, whereI can pretend. I can pretend I’m alone and far away. I don’t have to live in the temp with Emergents who pretend they are decent human beings.”

“But many of them are, Floria!”

Peres shook her head, and her voice rose. “Maybe. And maybe that’s the most terrible part of it. Emergents like Rita Liao and Jau Xin. Just folks, eh? And every day they use other human beings like less than animals, like—like machine parts. Even worse, that’s their living. Isn’t Liao a ‘programmer manager’ and Xin a ‘pilot manager’? The greatest evil in the universe, and they lap it up and then sit down with us in Benny’s parlor,and we accept them! “ Her voice scaled up to just short of a shriek, and she was abruptly silent. She closed her eyes tight, and tears floated gently downward through the air.

Qiwi reached out to touch Floria’s hand, not knowing if the other might simply strike her. This was a pain she saw in various people. Some she could reach. Others, like Ezr Vinh, held it so rigidly secret that all she felt was a hint of hidden, pulsing rage.

Floria was silent, hunched over on herself. But after a moment she grasped Qiwi’s hand in both her own and bowed her head toward it, weeping. Her words were choked, almost unintelligible. “…don’t blame you…. I really don’t. I know ’bout your father.” She gasped on silent sobs, and after a moment her words came more clearly. “I know you love this Tomas Nau. That’s okay. He couldn’t manage without you, but we’d probably all be dead then, too.”

Qiwi put her other arm around the woman’s shoulders. “But I don’t love him.” The words popped out, surprising her. And Floria looked up, surprised too.

“I mean, I respect him. He saved me when things were worst, after Jimmy killed my mother. But—” Strange to be talking to Floria like this, saying words that before she had said only inside herself. Tomas needed her. He was a good man raised in a terrible, evil system. The proof of his goodness was that he had come as far as he had, that he understood the evil and worked to end it. Qiwi doubted that she could have done as much; she would have been more like Rita and Jau, dumbly accepting, grateful to have evaded the net of Focus. Tomas Nau really wanted to change things. But love him? For all his humor, love, wisdom, there was a… remoteness… to Tomas. She hoped he never realized she felt that about him.And I hope subversive Floria has disabled Ritser’s bugs.

Qiwi pushed the thoughts away. For a moment she and Floria just stared at each other, surprised to see the other’s heart exposed.Hmm. She gave Floria a little pat on the shoulder. “I’ve known you for more than a year of shared Watch, and this is the first time there’s been any hint you felt this way….”

Floria released Qiwi’s hand, and wiped at the tears that still stood in her eyes. Her voice was almost under control. “Yeah. Before, I could always keep a lid on it. ‘Lie low,’ I told myself, ‘and be a proper little conquered Peddler.’ We’re naturally good at that, don’t you think? Maybe it comes from having the long view. But now… You know I had a sister in-fleet?”

“No.” I’m sorry. There had been so many Qeng Ho in the fleet before the fighting, and little Qiwi had known so few.

“Luan was a wild card, not too bright, but good with people… the sort a wise Fleet Captain throws in the mix.” A smile came close to surfacing, then drowned in bleak remembrance. “I have a doctorate in chemical engineering, but they Focused Luan and left me free. It should have beenme, but they took her instead.”

Floria’s face twisted with guilt that should not have been. Maybe Floria was immune to permanent infection by the mindrot, like many of the Qeng Ho. Or maybe not. Tomas needed at least as many free as Focused, else the system would die the death of details. Qiwi opened her mouth to explain, but Floria wasn’t listening.

“I lived with that. And I kept track of Luan. They Focused her on theirart . Watch-on-Watch, she and her gang carved out those friezes on Hammerfest. You probably saw her a hundred times.”

Yes, that is surely true.The carving gangs were the lowest of the Focused jobs. It wasn’t the high creation of Ali Lin or the translators. The patterns of the Emergent “legend art” left nothing to creativity. The workers beetled down the diamond corridors, centimeter by centimeter, scooping tiny bits from the walls according to the master pattern. Ritser’s original plan had been that the project burn up all the “waste human resources,” working them without medical care unto death.

“But they don’t work Watch-on-Watch anymore, Floria.” That had been one of Qiwi’s earliest triumphs over Ritser Brughel. The carving was made lighter work, and medical resources were made available to all who remained awake. The carvers would live through the Exile, to the manumissions that Tomas had promised.

Floria nodded. “Right, and even though our Watches were almost disjoint, I still kept track of Luan. I used to hang around the corridors, pretending to be passing through whenever other people came along. I even talked to her about that damn filthy art she loved; it was the only thing she could talk about, ‘The Defeat of the Frenkisch Orc.’” Floria all but spat the title. Her anger faded, and she seemed to wilt. “Even so, I still could see her and maybe, if I was a good little Peddler, she would be free someday. But now…” She turned to look at Qiwi and her voice once more lost its steadiness. “…now she’s gone, not even on the roster. They claim her coffin failed. They claim she died in coldsleep. The lying, treacherous, bastards…”

Qeng Ho coldsleep boxes were so safe that the failure rate was a kind of statistical guess, at least under proper use and for spans of less than 4Gsec. Emergent equipment was flakier, and since the fighting, nobody’s gear was absolutely trustable. Luan’s death was most likely a terrible accident, just another echo of the madness that had nearly killed them all.And how can I convince poor Floria of this? “I guess we can’t be certain of anything we are told, Floria. The Emergents have an evil system. But… I was on one hundred percent Watch for a long time. I’m on fifty percent even now. I’ve been into almost everything. And you know, in all that time, I haven’t caught Tomas in a lie.”

“Okay,” grudgingly.

“And why would anyone want to kill Luan?”

“I didn’t say ‘kill.’ And maybe your Tomas doesn’t know. See, I wasn’t the only one who hung around the diamond carvers. Twice, I saw Ritser Brughel. Once he had all the women together, and was behind them, just watching. The other time… the other time it was just him and Luan.”

“Oh.” The word came out very small.

“I don’t have evidence. What I saw was nothing more than a gesture, a posture, a look on a man’s face. And so I was silent, and now Luan is gone.”

Floria’s paranoia suddenly seemed quite plausible. Ritser Brughelwas a monster, a monster barely held in check by the Podmaster system. The memory of their confrontation had never left Qiwi, theslap slap slap of his steel baton in his hands as he raged at her. At the time, Qiwi had felt angry triumph at putting him down. Since, she’d realized how scared she should have been. Without Tomas, she surely would have died then… or worse. Ritser knew what would happen if he was caught.

Faking a death, even committing an unsanctioned execution, was tricky. The Podmasters had their own peculiar record-keeping requirements. Unless Ritser was very clever, there would be clues. “Listen, Floria. There are ways I can check on this. You could be right about Luan, but one way or another we’ll find out the truth. And if you’re right—well, there’s no way Tomas can put up with such abuse. He needs all the Qeng Ho cooperating, or none of us have a chance.”

Floria looked at her solemnly, then reached round to give her a fierce hug. Qiwi could feel the shivers that passed through her body, but she wasn’t crying. After a long moment, Floria said, “Thank you. Thank you. This last Msec, I’ve been so frightened… so ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“I love Luan, but Focus made her a stranger. I should have screamed bloody murder when I heard she was gone. Hell, I should have complained when I saw Brughel with her. But I was afraid for myself. Now…” Floria loosened her grip and regarded Qiwi with a shaky smile. “Now, maybe I’ve endangered someone else, too. But at least you have a chance… and you know, it’s possible that she’s alive even now, Qiwi. If we can find her soon enough.”

Qiwi raised her palm. “Maybe, maybe. Let’s see what I can discover.”

“Yes.” They finished their tea, discussed everything Floria could remember about her sister and what she had seen. She was doing her best now to seem calm, but relief and nervousness made her words come a bit too fast, made her gestures a bit too broad.

Qiwi helped her set the bonsai bubble and its wood stand in brackets beneath the room’s main light. “I can get you lots more wood. Gonle really, really wants you to program for meta-crylates. You might want to panel your home with polished wood, like old-time captains did their inner cabins.”

Floria looked around her little space, and played along. “I could indeed. Tell her, maybe we can do a deal.”

And then Qiwi was standing at the lock’s inner door, and pulling down her coverall hood. For a moment, the fear was back in Floria’s face. “Be careful, Qiwi.”

“I will.”

Qiwi took her taxi through the rest of its stops, inspecting the rockpile, posting problems and changes to the ziphead net. Meantime, her mind raced down scary corridors. It was just as well she had this time to think. If Floria was right, then even with Tomas on her side, this could be very dangerous. Ritser was just into too many things. If he was sabotaging the coldsleep or falsifying death records, then big parts of Tomas’s net had been subverted.

Does Ritser suspect that I know?Qiwi glided down across the canyon that separated Diamond Three from Diamond Four. Arachna’s blue light shone from directly behind her, illuminating the caves that were the rough interface between the blocks. There was sublimation from some of the water glue. It was too fine to show on the sensor grid, but when she hovered with her face just centimeters from the surface she could see it. Even as she called in the problem, another part of her mind was turning on the deadlier question: Floria was clever enough to sweep her little cabin, even the outside. And Qiwi was very careful with her suit. Tomas had given her permission to disable all its bugs, both official and covert. On the net it was a different story. If Ritser was doing what Floria thought, then very likely he was monitoring even pod communications. It would be tricky to discover anything without tipping him off.

So be very, very careful.She needed an excuse for anything she did now.Ah. The personnel studies that she and Ezr had been assigned. Coasting up from her inspection of the rockpile, it would be reasonable for her to work on that. She put in a low-priority call to Ezr asking for a conference, then downloaded a large block of the Watch and personnel database. The records on Luan would be in there, but they were now cached locally, and her processors were covered by Tomas’s own security.

She brought up the bio on Luan Peres. Yes, reported dead in coldsleep. Qiwi flicker-read down through the text. There was lots of jargon, conjecture about how the unit had failed. Qiwi had had years to practice with coldsleep gear, if only as a front-end technician. She could more or less follow the discussion, though it seemed like the florid overkill of a rambling ziphead, what you might get if youasked a Focused person to invent a credible failure.

The taxi floated out of the rockpile’s shadow and the sunlight washed away the quiet blues of Arachna-light. The rockpile sunside was naked rock, graphite on diamond. Qiwi dimmed the view and turned back to the report on Luan. It was almost a clean report. It might have fooled her if she hadn’t been suspicious or if she hadn’t known all the requirements of Emergent doc. Where were the third and fourth crosschecks on the autopsy? Reynolt always wanted her zips to do that; the woman lost what little flexibility she had when it came to ziphead fatalities.

The report was bogus. Tomas would understand that the moment she pointed it out to him.

A chime sounded in her ear. “Ezr, hello.” Damn. Her call to him had just been a cover, an excuse to download a big block and look at Luan’s records. But here he was. For a moment, he seemed to be sitting next to her in the taxi. Then the image flickered as her huds figured out they couldn’t manage the illusion, and settled for putting him in a fixed position pseudo-display. Behind him were the blue-green walls of the Hammerfest attic. He was visiting Trixia, of course.

The picture was more than good enough to show the impatience in his face. “I decided to get right back to you. You know I go off-Watch in sixty Ksec.”

“Yes, sorry to bother you. I’ve been looking over the personnel stats. For that planning committee stuff you and I are stuck with? Anyway, I came up with a question.” Her mind raced ahead of her words, searching madly for some issue that would justify this call. Funny how the least attempt at deception always seemed to make life more complicated. She stumbled along for a few sentences, finally came up with a really stupid question about specialist mixing.

Ezr was looking at her a little strangely now. He shrugged. “You’re asking about the end of the Exile, Qiwi. Who knows what we’ll need when the Spiders are ready for contact. I thought we were going to bring all specialties out of coldsleep then, and run flat out.”

“Of course, that’s the plan, but there are details—” Qiwi weaseled her way toward credibility. The main thing was just to end the conversation. “—so I’ll think about this some more. Let’s have a real meeting after you get back on from coldsleep.”

Ezr grimaced. “That will be a while. I’m off for fifty Msec.” Most of two years.

“What?” That was more than four times as long as his usual off-Watch.

“You know, new faces and all that.” There were branches of his Watch tree that had not had much time. Tomas and the manager committee—Qiwi and Ezr included!—had thought everyone should get hands-on time and exposure to the usual training courses.

“You’re starting a little early.” And 50Msec was longer than she expected.

“Yeah. Well, you have to start someplace.” He looked away from the video pov. At Trixia? When he looked back, his tone was less impatient but somehow more urgent. “Look, Qiwi. I’m going to be on ice for a big fifty, and even afterwards I’ll be on a low duty cycle for a while.” He raised a hand as if to forestall objections. “I’m not complaining! I participated in the decisions myself…. But Trixia will be on-Watch all that time. That’s longer than she has ever been alone. There’ll be nobody to stand up for her.”

Qiwi wished she could reach out and comfort him. “No one will harm her, Ezr.”

“Yeah, I know. She’s toovaluable to harm. Just like your father.” Something flickered in his eyes, but it wasn’t the usual anger. Poor Ezr was begging her. “They’ll keep her body working, they’ll keep her moderately clean. But I don’t want her hassled any more than she already is. Keep an eye on her, Qiwi. You have real power, at least over small fish like Trud Silipan.”

It was the first time Ezr had really asked her for help.

“I’ll watch out for her, Ezr,” Qiwi said softly. “I promise.”

After he rang off, Qiwi sat unmoving for several seconds. Strange that a phone call that was an accident and a scam should have such an impact. But Ezr had always had that effect on her. When she was thirteen, Ezr Vinh had seemed the most wonderful man in the universe—and the only way she could get his attention was by goading him. Such teenage crushes should vape away, right? Occasionally she wondered if the Diem massacre had somehow stunted her soul, trapped her affections as they were in the last innocent days before all the death…. Whatever the reason, it felt good that she could do something for him.

Maybe paranoia was contagious. Luan Peres dead. Now Ezr gone for even longer than they had planned.I wonder who actually specified thatWatch change? Qiwi looked back through her cache. The schedule change was nominally from the Watch-manager committee… with Ritser Brughel doing the actual sign-off. That happened often enough; one Podmaster or the other had to sign for all such changes.

Qiwi’s taxi continued its slow coast upward. From this distance, the rockpile was a craggy jumble, Diamond Two in sunlight, the glare obscuring all but the brightest stars. It might have been a wilderness scene except for the regular form of the Qeng Ho temp gleaming off to the side. With augmented vision, Qiwi could see the dozens of warehouses of the L1 system. Down in the shade of the rockpile were Hammerfest and the distillery, and the arsenal at L1-A. In the spaces around orbited the temp, the warehouses, the junked and semi-junked starships that had brought them all here. Qiwi used them as a kind of soft auxiliary to the electric jets. It was a well-tended dynamical system, even though it did look like chaos compared to the close mooring of the early Exile.

Qiwi took in the configuration with practiced eyes, even as her mind considered the much more treacherous problems of political intrigue. Ritser Brughel’s private domain, the old QHSInvisible Hand, was outward from the pile, less than two thousand meters from her taxi; she would pass less than fifteen hundred meters from its throat.Hmm. So, what if Ritser had kidnapped Luan Peres? That would be his boldest move ever against Tomas.And maybe it’s not the only thing. If Ritser could get away with this, there might be other deaths.Ezr.

Qiwi took a deep breath.Just take one problem at a time. So: SupposeFloria is right and Luan still lives, a toy in Ritser’s private space? There were limits to how fast Tomas could act against another Podmaster. If she complained, and there was any delay at all, Luan might die for real—and all the evidence could just… disappear.

Qiwi turned in her seat, got a naked-eye view of theHand. She was less than seventeen hundred meters out now. It might be days before she could wangle a configuration this slick. The starship’s stubby form was so close that she could see the emergency repair welds, and the blistering where X-ray fire had struck the ramscoop’s projection flange. Qiwi knew the architecture of theInvisible Hand about as well as anyone at L1; she had lived on that ship through years of the voyage here, had used it as her hands-on example of every ship topic in her schooling. She knew its blind spots…. More important, she had Podmaster-level access. It was just one of the many things that Tomas trusted her with. Until now she had never used it so, um, provocatively, but—

Qiwi’s hands were moving even before she finished rationalizing her scheme. She keyed in her personal crypto link to Tomas, and spoke quickly, outlining what she had learned and what she suspected—and what she planned to do. She squirted the message off, delivery contingent on a deadman condition. Now Tomas would know no matter what, and she would have something to threaten Ritser with if he caught her.

Sixteen hundred meters from theInvisible Hand. Qiwi pulled down her coverall hood, and cycled the taxi’s atmosphere. Her intuition and her huds agreed on the jump path she must follow, the trajectory that would take her down theHand ’s throat, in the ship’s blind spot all the way. She popped the taxi’s hatch, waited till her acrobatic instinct saidgo —and leaped into the emptiness.

Qiwi finger-walked down theHand ’s empty freight hold. Using a combination of Tomas’s authority and her own special knowledge of the ship’s architecture, she had reached the level of the living quarters without tripping any audible alarms. Every few meters, Qiwi put her ear to the wall, and simply listened. She was so close to on-Watch country that she could hear other people. Things sounded very ordinary, no sudden movement, no anxious talk…. Hmm. That sounded like someone crying.

Qiwi moved faster, feeling something like the giddy anger of her long-ago confrontation with Ritser Brughel—only now she had more sense, and was correspondingly more afraid. During their common Watches since that time in the park, she had often felt Ritser’s eyes upon her. She had always expected that there would be another confrontaion. As much as it was to honor her mother’s memory, Qiwi’s fanatical gym work—all the martial arts—was intended as insurance against Ritser and his steel baton.Lot ofgood it will do, if he pots me with a wire gun. But Ritser was such an idiot, he’d never kill her like that; he’d want to gloat. Today, if it came to it, she’d have time to threaten him with the message she’d left Tomas. She pushed down her fear, and moved closer to the sound of weeping.

Qiwi hovered over an access hatch. Suddenly her shoulders and arms were tense. Strange, random thoughts skittered through her mind.I willremember. I will remember. Freaky craziness.

Beyond this point, her only invisibility would be in her Podmaster passkey. Very likely that would not be enough.But I just need a few seconds. Qiwi checked her recorder and data link one last time… and slipped through the hatch, into a crew corridor.

Lord.For a moment, Qiwi just stared in astonishment. The corridor was the size that she remembered. Ten meters farther on, it curved right, toward the Captain’s living quarters. But Ritser had pasted wallpaper on all four walls, and the pictures were a kind of swirling pink. The air stank of animal musk. This was a different universe from the Invisible Hand that she had known. She grasped wildly at her courage, and moved slowly up the hallway. Now there was music ahead, at least the thump thump thump of percussion. Somebody was singing… sharp, barking screams, in time with the beat.

Like they had a life of their own, her shoulders cramped tight, aching to bounce off the wall and race back the way she had come.Do I need anymore proof? Yes. Just a look at the data system with a local override. That would mean more than any number of hysterical stories about Ritser’s choice of video and music.

Door by door, she moved up the corridor. These had been staff officer quarters, but used by the Watch crew on the voyage from Triland. She had lived in the second room from the end for three years—and she really didn’t want to know what that looked like now. The Captain’s planning room was just beyond the bend. She flicked her passkey at the lock, and the door slid open. Inside… this was no planning room. It looked like a cross between a gym and a bedroom. And the walls were again covered with video wallpaper. Qiwi pulled herself over a strange, gauntleted rack and settled down, out of sight of the doorway. She touched her huds, asked for a local override connection to the ship’s net. There was a pause as her location and authorization were checked, and then she was looking at names and dates and pictures.Yes! Ol’ Ritser was running his own small-scale coldsleep business right here on theInvisible Hand. Luan Peres was listed… and here she was listed as living, on-Watch!

That’s enough; time to get out of this madhouse. But Qiwi hesitated an instant longer. There were so many names here, familiar names and faces from long ago. Little death glyphs sat by each picture. She had been a child when she last saw these people, but not like this… these faces were variously sullen, sleeping, terribly bruised or burned. The living, the dead, the beaten, the fiercely resisting.This is from before Jimmy Diem. She knew there had been interrogations, a period of many Ksecs between the fighting and the resumption of Watches, but… Qiwi felt a numb horror spreading up from the pit of her stomach. She paged through the names. Kira Pen Lisolet. Mama. A bruised face, the eyes staring steadily back at her.Whatdid Ritser do to you? How could Tomas not know? She wasn’t really conscious of following the data links from that picture, but suddenly her huds were running an immersion video. The room was the same, but filled with the sights and sounds of long ago. As if from the other side of the rack, there came the sound of panting and moaning. Qiwi slid to the side and the vision tracked with near perfection. Around the corner of the rack, she came face-to-face with… Tomas Nau. A younger Tomas Nau. Out of sight, beyond the edge of the rack, he seemed to be thrusting from his hips. The look on his face was the sort of ecstatic pleasure that Qiwi had seen in his face so many times, the look he had when they could finally be alone and he could come in her. But this Tomas of years ago held a tiny, red-splattered knife. He leaned forward, out of sight, leaned down on someone whose moans changed to a shrill scream. Qiwi pulled herself over the edge of the rack and looked straight down at the true past, at the woman Nau was cutting.

“Mama!” The past didn’t notice her cry; Nau continued his business. Qiwi doubled up on herself, spewing vomit across the rack and beyond. She couldn’t see them anymore, but the sounds of the past continued, as if they were happening just on the other side of the rack. Even as her stomach emptied, she tore the huds from her face, threw them wildly away. She choked and gagged; gibbering horror was in charge of her reflexes.

The light changed as the room’s door opened. There were voices. Voices in the present. “Yeah, she’s in here, Marli.”

“Phew. What a mess.” Sounds of the two men quartering the room, coming closer to Qiwi’s hiding place. Mindlessly she retreated, floated down beneath the nightmare equipment, and braced herself against the floor.

A face coasted across her position.

“Got h—”

Qiwi exploded upward, the blade of her hand just missing the other’s neck. She slammed into the wall partition behind him. Pain lanced back along her arm.

She felt the prick of stunner darts. She turned, tried to bounce toward her attacker, but her legs were already dead. The two waited cautiously a second. Then the shooter, Marli, grinned and snagged her slowly-turning body. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe. But there was some sensation. She felt Marli draw her back to him, run his hand across her breasts. “She’s safed; don’t worry, Tung.” Marli laughed. “Or maybe you should worry. Look at that hole she put in the wall. Another four centimeters and you’d be breathing out the back of your neck!”

“Pus.” Tung’s voice was sullen.

“You got her? Good.” It was Tomas’s voice, from the door. Marli abruptly released his hold on her breasts. He coasted her around the equipment, into the open.

Qiwi couldn’t turn her head. She saw whatever happened to be before her eyes. Tomas, calm as ever. Calm as ever. He glanced at her in passing, nodded to Marli. Qiwi tried to scream, but no sound came. Tomas will kill me, like all the others…. But if he doesn’t? If he doesn’t, then nothing in God’s universe can save him.

Tomas turned. Ritser Brughel was behind him, disheveled and half-naked. “Ritser, this is inexcusable. The whole point of giving her access codes is to make capture predictable and easy. You knew she was coming, and you left yourself wide open.”

Brughel’s voice was whiny. “Plague take it. She’s never twigged this soon after her last scrub. And I had less than three hundred seconds from your first warning till she arrived here. That’s never happened before.”

Tomas glared at his Vice-Podmaster. “The second was just bad luck—something you should count on. The first…” He looked back at Qiwi, and his anger turned to thoughtfulness. “Something unexpected triggered her this time. Have Kal review just who she’s been talking to.”

He gestured to Marli and Tung. “Put her in a box and take her down to Hammerfest. Tell Anne I want the usual.”

“What cutoff time on the memories, sir?”

“I’ll talk to Anne about that myself. We’ve got some records to look at.”

Qiwi got a glimpse of the corridor, of hands dragging her along.Howmany times has this happened before? No matter how hard she strained, she couldn’t move a muscle. Inside she was screaming.This time I will remember. I willremember!

TWENTY-TWO

Pham followed Trud Silipan up the central tower of Hammerfest, toward the Attic. In a sense, this was the moment he had been angling for through Msecs of casual shmoozing—an excuse to get inside the Focus system, to see more than the results. No doubt he could have gotten here earlier—in fact, Silipan had offered more than once to show him around. Over the Watches they had known each other, Pham had made enough silly assertions about Focus, had bet Silipan and Xin enough scrip about his opinions; a plausible visit was inevitable. But there was plenty of time and Pham had never had quite the cover he’d wanted.Don’t fool yourself. Popping thelocalizers on Tomas Nau has put you in more danger than anything so far.

“Now, finally, you’re going to see behind the scenes, Pham old boy. After this, I hope you’ll shut up about some of your crazy theories.” Silipan was grinning; clearly, he’d been looking forward to this moment himself.

They drifted upward, past narrow tunnels that forked and forked. The place was a warren.

Pham pulled himself even with the coasting Silipan. “What’s to know? So you Emergents can make people into automatic devices. So what? Even a ziphead can’t multiply numbers faster than once or twice a second. Machines can do it trillions of times faster. So with zipheads, you get the pleasure of bossing people around—and for what? The slowest, crappiest automation since Humankind learned to write.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ve been saying that for years. But you’re still wrong.” He stuck out a foot, catching a stop with the toe of his shoe. “Keep your voice down inside the grouproom, okay?” They were facing a real door, not one of the little crawl hatches of lower down. Silipan waved it open and they drifted through. Pham’s first impression was of body odor and packed humanity.

“They do get pretty ripe, don’t they? They’re healthy, though. I see to that.” He spoke with a technician’s pride.

There was rack on rack of micro-gee seating, packed in a three-dimensional lattice that would have been impossible in any real gravity. Most of the seats were occupied. There were men and women of all ages, dressed in grays, most using what looked to be premium Qeng Ho head-up display devices. This wasn’t what he had been expecting. “I thought you kept them isolated,” in little cells such as Ezr Vinh had described in more than one tearful session in the booze parlor.

“Some we do. It depends on the application.” He waved at the room attendants, two men dressed like hospital orderlies. “This is a lot cheaper. Two guys can handle all the potty calls, and the usual fights.”

“Fights?”

“‘Professional disagreements.’” Silipan chuckled. “Snits, really. They’re only dangerous if they upset the mindrot’s balance.”

They floated diagonally upward between the close-packed rows. Some of the huds flickered transparently and he could see the zipheads’ eyes moving. But no one seemed to notice Pham and Trud; their vision was elsewhere.

There was low-pitched mumbling from all directions, the combined voices of all the zipheads in the room. There were a lot of people talking, all in short bursts of words—Nese, but still nonsense. The global effect was an almost hypnotic chant.

The zipheads typed ceaselessly on chording keyboards. Silipan pointed to their hands with special pride. “See, not one in five has any joint damage; we can’t afford to lose people. We have so few, and Reynolt can’t completely control the mindrot. But it’s been most of a year since we had a simple medical fatality—and that was almost unavoidable. Somehow the zip got a punctured colon rightafter a clean checkup. He was an isolated specialty. His performance fell off, but we didn’t know there was a problem till the smell got completely rank.” So the slave had died from the inside out, too dedicated to cry his pain, too neglected for anyone to notice. Trud Silipan was only caring in the mean.

They reached the top, looked back down the lattice of mumbling humanity. “Now in one way you’re right, Mr. Armsman Trinli. If these people were doing arithmetic or string sorting, this operation would be a joke. The smallest processor in a finger ring can do that sort of thing a billion times faster than any human. But you hear the zipheads talking?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s internal jargon; they get into that pretty fast when we work them in teams. But the point is, they’re not doing low-level machine functions. They’re using our computer resources. See, for us Emergents, the zipheads are the next system layer above software. They can apply human intelligence, but with the persistence and patience of a machine. And that’s also why unFocused specialists—especially techs like me—are important. Focus is useless unless there are normal people to direct it and to find the proper balance of hardware and software and Focus. Done right, the combination is totally beyond what you Qeng Ho ever achieved.”

Pham had long ago understood that, but denying the point provoked steadily more detailed explanations from Emergents like Trud Silipan. “So what is this group actually doing?”

“Let’s see.” He motioned for Pham to put on his huds. “Ah, see? We have them partitioned into three groups. The top third is rote-layer processing, zipheads that can be easily retargeted. They’re great for routine tasks, like direct queries. The middle third is programming. As a Programmer-at-Arms, this should interest you.” He popped up some dependency charts. They were squirrelly nonsense, immense blocks with no evolutionary coherence. “This is a rewrite of your own weapons targeting code.”

“Crap. I could never maintain something like that.”

“No,you couldn’t. But a Programmer-Manager—someone like Rita Liao—can, as long as she has a team of ziphead programmers. She’s having them rearrange and optimize the code. They’ve done what ordinary humans could do if they could concentrate endlessly. Together with good development software, these zips have produced a code that is about half the size of your original—and five times as fast on the same hardware. They also combed out hundreds of bugs.”

Pham didn’t say anything for a moment. He just paged through the maze of the dependency charts. Pham had hacked for years at the weapons programs. Sure there were bugs, as there were in any large system. But the weapons code had been the object of thousands of years of work, of constant effort to optimize and remove flaws…. He cleared his huds and looked across the ranked slaves.Such a terrible price to pay… for such wonderful results.

Silipan chuckled. “Can’t fool me, Trinli. I can tell you’re impressed.”

“Yeah, well if it works I am. So what’s the third group doing?”

But Silipan was already heading back to the entrance. “Oh, them.” He waved negligently at the zipheads on his right. “Reynolt’s ongoing project. We’re going through the corpus of your fleet system code, looking for trapdoors, that sort of thing.”

It was the wild-goose chase that preoccupied the most paranoid system administrators, but after what he’d just seen… suddenly Pham didn’t feel quite so secure.How long do I have before they notice some of mylong-agomods?

They left the grouproom and started back down the central tower. “See, Pham, you—all you Qeng Ho—grew up wearing blinders. You justknow certain things are impossible. I see the clichés in your literature: ‘Garbage input means garbage output’; ‘The trouble with automation is that it does exactly what you ask it’; ‘Automation can never be truly creative.’ Humankind has accepted such claims for thousands of years. But we Emergents have disproved them! With ziphead support, I can get correct performance from ambiguous inputs. I can get effective natural language translation. I can get human-quality judgment as part of the automation!”

They coasted downward at several meters per second; upward traffic was sparse just now. The light at the bottom of the tower glowed brighter. “Yeah, so what about creativity?” This was something Trud loved to pontificate on.

“Even that, Pham. Well, not all forms of creativity. Like I said, there is a real need for managers such as Rita and myself, and the Podmasters above us. But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books? As often as not, they’re some poor dweeb who doesn’t have a life. He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic. A sane person couldn’t justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard. Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected. See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race. We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.”

Silipan reached out, lightly touching the walls on both sides, slowing his descent. He dropped behind for a moment before Pham started braking too.

“How long till your appointment with Anne Reynolt?” Silipan asked.

“Just over a Ksec.”

“Okay, I’ll keep this short. Can’t keep the boss lady waiting.” He laughed. Silipan seemed to have an especially low regard for Anne Reynolt. If she were incompetent, a lot of things would be simpler for Pham….

They passed through a pressure door, into what might have been a sickbay. There were a few coldsleep coffins; they looked like medical temporaries. Visible behind the equipment was another door, this one bearing a Podmaster special seal. Trud gave a nervous glance in that direction, and did not look back again.

“So. Here’s where it all happens, Pham. The real magic of Focus.” He dragged Pham across the room, away from the half-hidden door. A technician was working by the limp form of a ziphead, maneuvering the “patient’s” head into one of the large toroids that dominated the room. Those might be diagnostic imagers, though they were even clunkier-looking than most Emergent hardware.

“You already know the basic principles, right, Pham?”

“Sure.” Those had been carefully explained in the first Watch after Jimmy’s murder. “You’ve got this special virus, the mindrot; you infected us all.”

“Right, right. But that was a military operation. In most cases the rot didn’t get past the blood/brain barrier. But when it does… You know about glial cells? You’ve got lots more of those in your brain than neurons, actually. Anyway, the rot uses the glials as a kind of broth, infects almost all of them. After four days or so—”

“—You have a ziphead?”

“No. You have the raw material for a ziphead; many of you Qeng Ho ended up in that state—unFocused, perfectly healthy, but with the infection permanently established. In such people, every neuron in the brain is adjacent to infection cells. And each rotted cell has a menu of neuro-actives it can secrete. Now, this guy—” He turned to the tech, who was still working on the comatose ziphead. “Bil, whatis this one in for?”

Bil Phuong shrugged. “He’s been fighting. Al had to stun him. There’s no chance of mindrot runaway, but Reynolt wants his basal-five retrained on the sequence from…”

The two traded jargon. Pham glanced with careful disinterest at the ziphead. Egil Manrhi. Egil had been the punning-est armsman in pre-Flight. But now… now he was probably a better analyst than he had ever been before.

Trud was nodding at Phuong: “Huh. I don’t see why messing with basal-five will do any good. But then she is the boss, isn’t she?” He grinned at the other. “Hey, let me do this one, okay? I want to show Pham.”

“Just so you sign for it.” Phuong moved out of their way, looking faintly bored. Silipan slid down beside the gray-painted toroid. Pham noticed that the gadget had separate power cables, each a centimeter wide.

“Is this some kind of an imager, Trud? It looks like obsolete junk.”

“Ha. Not exactly. Help me get this guy’s head in the cradle. Don’t let him touch the sides….” An alarm tone sounded. “And for God’s sake, give Bil that ring you’re wearing. If you’re standing in the wrong place, the magnets in this baby would tear your finger off.”

Even in low gee, it was awkward to maneuver the comatose Egil Manrhi. It was a tight fit, and the rockpile’s gravity was just strong enough to drag Egil’s head onto the lower side of the hole.

Trud moved back from his handiwork, and smiled. “All set. Now you’re going to see what it’s all about, Pham, my boy.” He spoke commands and some kind of medical image floated in the air between them, presumably a view inside Egil’s head. Pham could recognize gross anatomical features, but this was far from anything he had studied. “You’re right about the imaging, Pham. This is standard MRI, as old as time. But it’s good enough. See, the basal-five harmony is generated here.” A pointer moved along a complex curve near the surface of the brain.

“Now here’s the cute thing, what makes mindrot more than a neuropathic curiosity.” A galaxy of tiny glowing dots appeared in the three-dimensional image. They glowed in every color, though most were pink. There were clusters and strands of tiny dots, many of them flickering in time with one another. “You’re seeing infected glial cells, at least the relevant groups.”

“The colors?”

“Those show current drug secretion by type…. Now, what I want to do…” More commands, and Pham had his first look at the toroid’s user manual. “…is change the output and firing frequency along this path.” His little marker arrow swept along one of the threads of light. He grinned at Pham. “Thisis how our gear is more than an imager. See, the mindrot virus expresses certain para- and dia-magnetic proteins, andthese respond variously to magnetic fields to trigger the production of specific neuroactives. So while you Qeng Ho and all the rest of humanity use MRI solely as anobserving tool, we Emergents can use it actively, to make changes.” He tapped his keyboard; Pham heard a creaking sound as the superconducting cables spread apart from each other. Egil twitched a couple of times. Trud reached out to steady him. “Damn. Can’t get millimeter resolution with him thrashing.”

“I don’t see any change in the brain map.”

“You won’t till I turn off active mode. You can’t image and modify at the same time.” He paused, watching the step-by-step in the manual. “Almost done…. There! Okay, let’s see the changes.” There was a new picture. And now the glowing thread of lights was mostly blue, and frantically blinking. “It’ll take a few seconds to settle in.” He continued to watch the model as he talked. “See, Pham. This is what I’m really good at. I don’t know what you could compare me to in your culture. I’m a little like a programmer, but I don’t code. I’m a little like a neurologist, exceptI get results. I guess I’m most like a hardware technician. I keep the gear going for all the higher-ups who take the credit.”

Trud frowned. “…Hunh? Pus.” He looked across the room at where the other Emergent was working. “Bil, this guy’s leptin-dop ratio is still low.”

“You turned off the field?”

“Of course. Basal-five should have retrained by now.”

Bil didn’t come over, but apparently he was looking at the patient’s brain model.

The line of blue glitter was still a jumble of random change. Trud continued, “It’s just a loose end, but I don’t know what’s causing it. Can you take care of it?” He hooked a thumb in Pham’s direction, indicating he had other, more important business.

Bil said, dubiously, “You did sign for it?”

“Yes, yes. Just take care of it, huh?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks.” Silipan gestured Pham away from the MRI gear; the brain image vanished. “That Reynolt. Her jobs are the trickiest, not by the book. Then, when you do it the right way, you’re likely to end up in a heap of trouble.”

Pham followed him out the door and down a side tunnel that cut through the crystal of Diamond One. The walls were a chiseled mosaic, the same style of precise artwork that had mystified Pham long ago, at the “welcoming banquet.” Not all the zipheads were high-tech specialists: they passed a dozen slave artists clustered around the circumference of the tunnel, hunched close over magnifying glasses and needle-like tools. Pham had been along here before, several Watches earlier. Then, the frieze had been only roughly outlined, a mountain landscape with some sort of military force moving toward a nebulous goal. Even that had been a guess, based on the title: “The Defeat of the Frenkisch Orc.” Now the figures were mostly complete, sturdy heroic fighters that glittered rainbows. Their goal was some kind of monster. The creature wasn’t that novel, a typical Cthulhonic horror, tearing humans with its long claws and eating the pieces. Emergents made a big thing of their conquest of Frenk. Somehow, Pham doubted that the mutations they had warred against had been so spectacular. He slowed, and Silipan took his stare for admiration.

“The carvers make only fifty centimeters’ progress every Msec. But the art brings some of the warmth of our past.”

Warmth? “Reynolt wants things pretty?” It was a random question.

“Ha. Reynolt couldn’t care less. Podmaster Brughel ordered this, per my recommendation.”

“But I thought Podmasters were sovereign in their domains.” Pham hadn’t seen much of Reynolt on prior Watches, but he had seen her humiliate Ritser Brughel in meetings with Nau.

Trud continued on for several meters, not speaking. His face quirked in a silly smile, a look he sometimes got during their bull sessions at Benny’s. This time though, the smiled broke into laughter. “Podmaster? Anne Reynolt? Pham, watching you boggle has already made my day—but this tops all.” He coasted for several seconds more, still chuckling. Then he saw the glower on Pham Trinli’s face. “I’m sorry, Pham. You Peddlers are clever in so many ways, but you’re like children when it comes to the basics of culture…. I got you cleared to see the Focus clinic; I guess it can’t hurt to spell some other things out. No, Anne Reynolt is not a Podmaster, though most likely she was a powerful one, once upon a time. Reynolt is just another ziphead.”

Pham let his glower fade to blank astonishment—which also happened to be his true reaction. “But… she’s running a big part of the show. She gives you orders.”

Silipan shrugged. His smile had changed to something sour. “Yeah. She gives me orders. It’s a rare thing, but it can happen. I’d almost rather work for Podmaster Brughel and Kal Omo except that they play so… rough.” His voice trailed off nervously.

Pham caught up. “I think I see,” he lied. “When a specialist gets Focused, he fixates on his specialty. So anartist becomes one of your mosaic carvers, a physicist becomes like Hunte Wen, and a manager becomes, uh, I don’t know, the manager from Hell.”

Trud shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. See, technical specialties Focus well. We got a seventy-percent success rate even with you Qeng Ho. But people skills—counseling, politics, personnel management—normally, those don’t survive Focusing at all. You’ve seen enough zipheads by now; the one thing they have in common is flat affect. They can no more imagine what’s going on in a normal person’s head than a rock can. We’re lucky to have as many good translators as we do; that’s never been tried on this scale before.

“No. Anne Reynolt is something very, very rare. Rumor is, she was a High Podmaster in the Xevalle clique. Most of those got killed or mind-scrubbed, but the story is Reynolt had really pissed the Nauly clique. For laughs they Focused her; maybe they thought to use her as body comfort.

But that’s not how it turned out. My guess is, she was already close to being a monomaniac. It was one chance in a billion, but Reynolt’s management abilities survived—even some of her people skills survived.”

Up ahead, Pham could see the end of the tunnel. Light shone on an unadorned hatch. Trud came to a stop and turned to face Pham. “She’s a freak, but she is also Podmaster Nau’s most valued property. In principle, she doubles his reach….” He grimaced. “It doesn’t make it any easier to take orders from her, I’ll tell you that. Personally, I think the Podmaster overrates her. She’s a miraculous freak, but so what? It’s like a dog that writes poetry—no one notices that it’s doggerel.”

“You don’t seem to care if she knows your opinion.”

Now Trud was smiling again. “Of course not. That’s the one plus of my situation. She’s almost impossible to fool on things directly related to my job—but outside of that she’s like any other ziphead. Why, I’ve played some pus-funny j—” He stopped. “Ah, never mind. Tell her what Podmaster Nau asked you to and you’ll be okay.” He winked, then started back up the corridor, away from Reynolt’s office.

“Watch her close. You’ll see what I mean.”

If Pham had known about Anne Reynolt, he might have postponed the whole localizer scam. But now he was sitting in her office, and there weren’t many options. In a way it felt good to be winging it. Ever since Jimmy died, every one of Pham’s moves had been so considered, so damned cautious.

At first, the woman didn’t even acknowledge his presence. Pham sat uninvited on the chair across from her desk and looked around the room. It was nothing like Nau’s office. These walls were naked, rough diamond. There were no pictures, not even the abominations that passed for Emergent art. Reynolt’s desk was an agglomeration of empty storage crates and network gear.

And Reynolt herself? Pham stared at her face more intently than he might have dared otherwise. He’d been in her presence maybe 20Ksec total and those encounters had been in meetings, with Reynolt generally at the far end of the table. She always dressed plainly, except for that silver necklace tucked down into her blouse. With her red hair and pale skin, the woman might have been Ritser Brughel’s sister. The physical type was rare in this end of Human Space, arising most often from local mutation. Anne might have been thirty years old—or a couple of centuries, with really good medical support. In a crazy, exotic way she was lovely. Physically lovely.So you were a Podmaster.

Reynolt’s gaze flickered up, and impaled him for an instant. “Okay. You’re here to tell me the details of these localizers.”

Pham nodded. Strange. After that momentary glance, her gaze shifted away from his eyes. She was watching his lips, his throat, only briefly his eyes. There was no sympathy, no communication, but Pham had the chill feeling that she was seeing through all his masks.

“Good. What is their standard sensorium?”

He grumbled through the answers, claiming ignorance of details.

Reynolt didn’t seem to take offense. Her questions were delivered in a uniformly calm, mildly contemptuous tone. Then: “This isn’t enough to work with. I need the manuals.”

“Sure. That’s what I’m here for. The full manuals are on the localizer chips, encrypted beneath what ordinary techs are allowed to see.”

Again that long, scattered stare: “We’ve looked. We don’t see them.”

This was the dangerous part. At best, Nau and Brughel would be taking a very close look at Trinli’s buffoon persona. At worst… if they realized he was giving away secrets that even top armsmen wouldn’t know, he’d be in serious trouble. Pham pointed to a head-up display on Reynolt’s desk. “Allow me,” he said.

Reynolt didn’t react to his flippancy, but she did put on the huds and accepted consensual imaging. Pham continued, “I remember the passcode. It’s long, though”—and the full version was keyed to his own body, but he didn’t say that. He tried several incorrect codes, and acted irritable and nervous when they failed. A normal human, even Tomas Nau, would have expressed impatience—or laughed.

Reynolt didn’t say anything. She just sat there. But then, suddenly, “I have no patience for this. Do not pretend incompetence.”

She knew.In all the time since Triland, no one had ever seen this far behind his cover. He’d hoped for more time; once they started using the localizers he could write some new cover for himself.Damn. Then he remembered what Silipan had said. Anne Reynolt knewsomething. Most likely, she had simply concluded that Trinli was a reluctant informant.

“Sorry,” Pham mumbled. He typed in the correct sequence.

A simple acknowledgment came back from the fleet library, chip doc subsection. The glyphs floated silver on the air between them. The secret inventory data, the component specifications.

“Good enough,” said Reynolt. She did something with her control, and her office seemed to vanish. The two of them floated through the inventory information, and then they were standing within the localizers’ specifications.

“As you said, temperature, sonics, light levels… multispectrum. But this is more elaborate than you described at the meeting.”

“I said it was good. These are just the details.”

Reynolt spoke quickly, reviewing capability after capability. Now she sounded almost excited. This was far beyond the corresponding Emergent products. “A naked localizer, with a good sensorium and independent operation.” And she was seeing only the part that Pham wanted her to see.

“You do have to pulse it power.”

“Just as well. That way we can limit its use till we thoroughly understand it.”

She flicked away the image, and they were sitting in her office again, the lights sparkling cool off the rough walls. Pham could feel himself beginning to sweat.

She wasn’t even looking at him anymore. “The inventory showed several million localizers in addition to those embedded in fleet hardware.”

“Sure. Inactive, they pack into just a few liters.”

Calm observation: “You were fools not to use them for security.”

Pham glowered at her. “We armsmen knew what they could do. In a military situation—”

But those were not the details in Anne Reynolt’s Focus. She waved him silent. “It looks like we have more than enough for our purposes.”

The beautiful janissary looked back into Pham’s face. For an instant, her gaze stabbed directly into his eyes.

“You’ve made possible a new era of control, Armsman.”

Pham looked into the clear blue eyes and nodded; he hoped she didn’t understand the full truth that she spoke. And now Pham realized how central she was to all his plans. Anne Reynolt managed almost all the zipheads. Anne Reynolt was Tomas Nau’s direct control over operations. Anne Reynolt understood the things about the Emergents that a successful revolutionary must understand. And Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. She might figure out what he was up to—or she might be the key to destroying Nau and Brughel.

Things never got completely quiet in an ad hoc habitat. The Traders’ temp was only a hundred meters across; the crew, bouncing around in it, created stresses that could not be completely damped. And thermal stress made an occasional loud snapping sound. But just now was in the middle of most of the crew’s sleep period; Pham Nuwen’s little cabin was about as quiet as it ever got. He floated in the darkened cabin, pretending to drowse. His secret life was about to become very busy. The Emergents didn’t know it, but they’d just been snared by a trap that went deeper than most any Qeng Ho Fleet Captain knew about. It was one of two or three scams that Pham Nuwen had set up long ago. Sura and a few others had known about them, but even after Brisgo Gap, the knowledge hadn’t seeped into the general Qeng Ho armamentarium. Pham had always wondered about that; Sura could be subtle.

How long would it take Reynolt and Brughel to retrain their people to use the localizers? There were more than enough of the gadgets to run the L1 stab operations, and also snoop all living spaces. At third meal, some of the comm people had told of spikes in the temp’s cable spine. Ten times a second, a microwave pulse spread through the temp—enough wireless power to keep the localizers well fed. Just before the beginning of the sleep period, he’d noticed the first of the dustmotes come wafting through the ventilator. Right now, Brughel and Reynolt were probably calibrating the system. Brughel and Nau would be congratulating themselves on the quality of the sound and video. With good luck, they would eventually phase out their own clunky spy devices; even if he wasn’t so lucky… well, in a few Msecs he would have the ability to subvert the reports from them.

Something scarcely heavier than a dustmote settled on his cheek. He made as if to wipe his face, and in the act settled the mote just beside his eyelid. A few moments later he poked another deep within the channel of his right ear. It was ironic, considering how much effort the Emergents had gone to, disabling untrusted I/O devices.

The localizers did everything that Pham had told Tomas Nau. Just as such devices had done through all of human history, these located one another in geometrical space—a simple exercise, nothing more than a time-of-flight computation. The Qeng Ho versions were smaller than most, could be powered by wireless across short distances, and had a simple set of sensors. They made great spy devices, just what Podmaster Nau needed. Localizers were by their nature a type of computer network, in fact a type of distributed processor. Each little dustmote had a small amount of computing ability—and they communicated with one another. A few hundred thousand of them dusted across the Traders’ temp was more computing power than all the gear that Nau and Brughel had brought aboard. Of course, all localizers—even the Emergent clunkers—had such computational potential. The real secret of the Qeng Ho version was that no added interface was necessary, for output or input. If you knew the secret, you could access the Qeng Ho localizers directly, let the localizers sense your body position, interpret the proper codings, and respond with built-in effectors. Itdidn’t matter that the Emergents had removed all front-end interfaces from the temp. Now a Qeng Ho interface was all around them, for anyone who knew the secrets.

Access took special knowledge and some concentration. It was not something that could happen by accident or under coercion. Pham relaxed in the hammock, partly to pretend to finally fall asleep, partly to get in the mood for his coming work. He needed a particular pattern of heartbeats, a particular cadence of breathing.Do I even remember it anymore, after allthis time? The sharp moment of panic took him aback. One mote by his eye, another in his ear; that should be enough to provide alignment for the other localizers that must be floating in the room. That should be enough.

But the proper mood still eluded him. He kept thinking back to Anne Reynolt and to what Silipan had shown him. The Focused would see through his schemes; it was just a matter of time. Focus was a miracle. Pham Nuwen could have made the Qeng Ho a true empire—despite Sura’s treachery—if only he’d had Focused tools. Yes, the price was high. Pham remembered the rows of zombies up in Hammerfest’s Attic. He could see a dozen ways to make the system gentler, but in the end, to use Focused tools, there would have to be some sacrifice.

Was final success, a true Qeng Ho empire, worth that price? Could he pay it?

Yes and yes!

At this rate he’d never achieve access state. He backed off, began the whole relax cycle again. He let his imagination slide into memories. What had it been like in the beginning times? Sura Vinh had delivered theReprise and a still very naive Pham Nuwen to the megalopolis moons of Namqem….

He had remained at Namqem for fifteen years. They were the happiest years of Pham Nuwen’s life. Sura’s cousins were in-system, too—and they fell in love with the schemes that Sura and her young barbarian proposed: a method of interstellar synchronization, the trading of technical tricks where their own buying and selling would not be affected, the prospect of a cohesive interstellar trading culture. (Pham learned not to talk about his goals beyond that.) Sura’s cousins were back from some very profitable adventures, but they could see the limits of isolated trading. Left to themselves, they would make fortunes, even keep them for a time… but in the end they would be lost in time and the interstellar dark. They had a gut appreciation for many of Pham’s goals.

In some ways, his time with Sura at Namqem was like their first days on theReprise. But this went on and on, the imaginings and the teaming ever richer. And there were wonders that his hard head with all its grandiose plans had never considered: children. He had never imagined how different a family could be from the one of his birth. Ratko, Butra, and Qo were their first little ones. He lived with them, taught them, played blinkertalk and evercatch with them, showed them the wonders of the Namqem world park. Pham loved them far more than himself, and almost as much as he loved Sura. He almost abandoned the Grand Schedule to stay with them. But there would be other times, and Sura forgave him. When he returned, thirty years later, Sura awaited, with news of other parts of the Plan well under way. But by then their first three children were themselves avoyaging, playing their own part in founding the new Qeng Ho.

Pham ended up with a fleet of three starships. There were setbacks and disasters. Treachery. Zamle Eng leaving him for dead in Kielle’s comet cloud. Twenty years he was fleetless at Kielle, making himself a trillionaire from scratch, just to escape the place.

Sura flew with him on several missions, and they raised new families on half a dozen worlds. A century passed. Three. The mission protocols they had devised on the oldReprise served them well, and across the years there were reunions with children and children’s children. Some were greater friends than Ratko or Butra or Qo, but he never loved them quite so much. Pham could see the new structure emerging. Now it was simply trade, sometimes leavened with family ties. It would be much more.

The hardest thing was the realization that they needed someone at the center, at least in the early centuries. More and more Sura stayed behind, coordinating what Pham and others undertook.

And yet they still had children. Sura had new sons and daughters while Pham was light-years away. He joked with her about the miracle, though in truth he was hurt at the thought she had other lovers. Sura had smiled gently and shook her head. “No, Pham, any child I call my own is also of you.” Her smile turned mischievous. “Over the years, you have stuffed me with enough of yourself to birth an army. I can’t use that gift all at once, but use it I will.”

“No clones.” Pham’s word came out sharper than he intended.

“Lord, no.” She looked away. “I… one of you is all I can handle.”

Maybe she was just as superstitious as he was. Or maybe not: “No, I’m using you in natural zygotes. I’m not always the other donor, or the only other donor. Namqem medics are very good at this kind of thing.” She turned back, and saw the look on his face. “I swear, Pham, every one of your children has a family. Every one is loved…. We need them, Pham. We need families and Great Families. The Plan needs them.” She jabbed at him playfully, trying to jolly the disapproval from his face. “Hey, Pham! Isn’t this the wet dream of every conquering barbarian lord? Well, I’ll tell you, you’ve outfathered the greatest of them.”

Yes. Thousands of children by dozens of partners, raised without personal cost to the father. His own father had unsuccessfully attempted something much smaller with his campaign of regicide and concubinage in the North Coast states. Pham was getting it all without the murder, without the violence. And yet… how long had Sura been doing this? How many children, and by how many “donors”? He could imagine her now, planning bloodlines, slotting the right talents into the founding of each new Family, dispersing them throughout the new Qeng Ho. He felt the strangest double vision as he turned the situation around in his mind. As Sura said, it was a barbarian wet dream… but it was also a little like being raped.

“I would have told you at the beginning, Pham. But I was afraid you would object. And this is so important.” In the end, Pham did not object. Itwould advance their Plan. But it hurt to think of all the children he would never know.

Voyaging at 0.3c, Pham Nuwen traveled far. Everywhere there were Traders, though beyond thirty light-years, they rarely called themselves “Qeng Ho.” It didn’t matter. They could understand the Plan. The ones he met spread the ideas still farther. Wherever they went—and farther, since some were convinced simply by the radio messages Pham sent across the dark—the spirit of the Qeng Ho was spread.

Pham returned to Namqem again and again, bending the Grand Schedule almost to its breaking point. Sura was aging. She was two or three centuries old now. Her body was at the limit of what medical science could make young and supple. Even some of their children were old, living too long in port amid their voyaging. And sometimes in Sura’s eyes, Pham glimpsed unknowable experience.

Each time he returned to Namqem, he tossed the question up at her. Finally, one night after love almost as good as they had ever had, he came close to bawling. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, Sura! The Plan was for both of us. Come away with me. At least, go a voyaging.” And we can meet again and again, however long we live.

Sura leaned back from him and slipped her hand behind his neck. Her smile was crooked and sad. “I know. We thought we could both be fly-abouts. Strange that that’s the biggest mistake we had in all our original scheming. But, be honest. You know that one of us has to stay in some central place, has to deal with the Plan almost in one long Watch.” There were a trillion little details involved in conquering the universe, and they couldn’t be handled while you were in coldsleep.

“Yes, in the early centuries. But not for… not for your whole life!”

Sura shook her head, her hand brushing gently at his neck. “I’m afraid we were wrong.” She saw the look on his face, the anguish, and she drew him down to her. “My poor barbarian prince.” He could hear the fond, mocking smile in her words. “You are my unique treasure. And do you know why? You’re a flaming genius. You’re driven. But the reason I’ve always loved you is something more. Inside your head, you are such a contradiction. Little Pham grew up in a rundown suburb of Hell. You saw betrayal and you were betrayed. You understand violent evil as well as the most bloody-handed villain. And yet, little Pham also bought into all the myths of chivalry and honor and quest. Somehow in your head, both live at once, and you’ve spent your life trying to make the universe fit your contradictions. You will come very close to achieving that goal, close enough for me or any reasonable person—but maybe not close enough to satisfy yourself. So. I must stay if our Plan is to succeed. And you must go for the same reason. Unfortunately you know that, don’t you, Pham?”

Pham looked out the real windows that surrounded Sura’s penthouse. They were at the top of an office spire sticking high out of Namqem’s largest megalopolis moon. Tarelsk office real estate prices were in a frenzy that was downright absurd considering the power of network communication. The last time this tower had been on the open market, the annual rental on the penthouse floor could havebought a starship. For the last seventy years, Qeng Ho Families—mostly his and Sura’s descendants—had owned the spire and huge swaths of the surrounding office territory. It was the smallest part of their holdings, a nod to fashion.

Just now, it was early evening. The crescent of Namqem hung low in the sky; the lights of the Tarelsk business district rivaled the mother world’s glow. The Vinh & Mamso shipyards would rise in another Ksec or so. Vinh & Mamso were probably the largest yards in Human Space. Yet even that was a small part of their Families’ wealth. And beyond that—stretching ever more tenuously to the limits of Human Space, but growing still—was the cooperative wealth of the Qeng Ho. He and Sura had founded the greatest trading culture in the history of all time. That was how Sura saw it. That was all she ever saw. It was all she ever wanted. Sura didn’t mind that she wouldn’t live in the era of their final success… because she thought it would never come.

So Pham stilled the tears that waited behind his eyes. He slipped his arms gently around Sura, and kissed her neck. “Yes, I know,” he finally said.

Pham postponed his departure from Namqem for two years, five. He stayed so long that the Grand Schedule itself was broken. There would be appointments missed. Any more delay and the Plan itself might fail. And when he finally left Sura, something died inside him. Their partnership survived, even their love, in some abstract way. But a chasm of time had opened between them and he knew they could never bridge it again.

By the time he had lived one hundred years, Pham Nuwen had seen more than thirty solar systems, a hundred cultures. There were Traders who had seen more, but not many. Certainly Sura, huddled in planning mode back on Namqem, never saw what Pham did. Sura had only books and histories, reports from far away.

For sessile civilizations, even space-faring ones, nothing lasted forever. It was something of a miracle that the human race had survived long enough to escape Earth. There were so many ways that an intelligent race could make itself extinct. Deadlocks and runaways, plagues, atmosphere catastrophes, impact events—those were the simplest dangers. Humankind had lived long enough to understand some of the threats. Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, it ossified and politics carried it into a fall. Pham Nuwen had been born on Canberra in the depths of a dark age. He knew now that the disaster had been mild by some standards—after all, the human race had survived on Canberra even though it lost its high technology. There were worlds that Pham visited multiple times during his first hundred years. Sometimes, it was centuries between the visits. He saw the utopia that had been Neumars fade into overpopulated dictatorship, the ocean cities becoming slums for billions. Seventy years later, he came back to a world with a population of one million, a world of small villages, of savages with painted faces and hand-axes and songs of heartbreak. The voyage would have been a bust, if not for the chants of Vilnios. But Neumars was lucky compared to the dead worlds. Old Earth had been recolonized from scratch four times since the diaspora began.

There had to be a better way, and every new world Pham saw made him more sure that he knew that better way.Empire. A government so large that the failure of an entire solar system would be a manageable disaster. The Qeng Ho trading culture was a start. It would become the Qeng Ho trading empire… and someday a true, governing empire. For the Qeng Ho were in a unique position. At its peak, a Customer civilization possessed extraordinary science—and sometimes made marginal improvements over the best that had ever existed before. Most often, these improvements died when the civilization died. The Qeng Ho, however—they went on forever, patiently gathering the best that could be found. To Sura, that was the Qeng Ho’s greatest trading edge.

To Pham Nuwen, it was more.Why should we trade back all that welearn? Some, yes. That is largely how we make our living. But let us takethe glittering peaks of all human progress—and hold them for the goodof all .

That was how the “Qeng Ho” localizers had come to be. Pham had been aground on Trygve Ytre, as far from Namqem as he had ever voyaged. The people were not even from the same ur-stock as the humans of familiar parts of Human Space.

Trygve’s sun was one of those dim little M stars, the vermin of the colonizable galaxy. There were dozens of such stars for every one that was like Old Earth’s sun—and most had planets. They were dangerous places to settle, the stellar ecosphere so narrow that a civilization without technology could not exist. In the early millennia of Humankind’s conquest of space, that fact had been ignored, and a number of such worlds had been colonized. Ever optimistic, these humans, thinking their technology would last forever. And then at the first Fall, millions of people were left on a world of ice—or a world of fire, if the planet was on the inner side of their star’s ecosphere.

Trygve Ytre was a slightly safer variant, and a common situation: The star was accompanied by a giant planet, Trygve, which orbited a bit outside of the primary’s ecosphere. The giant planet had just two moons, one of them Earth-sized. Both were inhabited in the era when Pham visited. But the larger, Ytre, was the gem. Tidal and direct heating from Trygve supplemented the sun’s meager output. Ytre had land and air and liquid oceans. The humans of Trygve Ytre had survived at least one collapse of their civilization.

What they had now was a technology as high as Humankind ever attained. Pham’s little fleet of starships was welcomed, found decent shipyards in the asteroid belt that lay a billion kilometers out from the sun. Pham left crews aboard the ships, and took local transport inward, to Trygve and Ytre. This was no Namqem, but these people had seen other Traders. They had also seen Pham’s ramscoops and his preliminary trading list… and most of what Pham had did not measure up to Ytre’s native magics.

Nuwen stayed on Ytre for a time, someweeks the locals called the unit, the 600Ksec or so that it took giant Ytre to orbit Trygve. Trygve itself orbited the sun in just over 6Msec. So the Ytreisch calendar worked out neatly to ten weeks.

Though the world teetered between fire and ice, much of Ytre was habitable. “We have a more climate-stable world than Old Earth itself,” the locals bragged. “Ytre is deep within Trygve’s gravity well, with no significant perturbers. The tidal heating has been mellow across a geologic time.” And even the dangers were no big surprise. The M3 sun was just over one degree across. A foolish person could look directly at the reddish disk, see the whorling of gasses, see sunspots vast and dark. A few seconds of such sungazing could cause serious retinal burns, since of course the star was far brighter in the near-IR than in visible light. The recommended eye protectors looked like clear plastic, but Pham was very careful to wear them.

His hosts—a group of local companies—put him up at their expense. He spent his official time trying to learn more of their language and trying to discover something his fleet had brought that might be worth something to his customers. They were trying just as hard. It was something like industrial espionage in reverse. The locals’ electronics was a little better than Pham had ever seen, though there were program improvements the Qeng Ho might suggest. Their medical automation was significantly backward; that would be his foot in the door, a place to haggle from.

Pham and his staff categorized all the things they might bring from this encounter. It would pay for the voyage and more. But Pham heard rumors. His hosts represented a number of—“cartels” was the nearest translation that Pham could make of the word. They hid things from one another. The rumor was of a new type of localizer, smaller than any made elsewhere, and needing no internal power supply. Any improvement in localizers was a profitable item; the gadgets were the positional glue that made embedded systems so powerful. But these “super” localizers were alleged to contain sensors and effectors. If it was anything more than rumor, it would have political and military consequences on Ytre itself—destabilizing consequences.

By now, Pham Nuwen knew how to collect information in a technical society, even one where he wasn’t a fluent speaker, even one where he was being watched. In four weeks he knew which cartel might have the maybe-existent invention. He knew the name of its magnate: Gunnar Larson. The Larson cartel had not mentioned the invention in their trading negotiations. It was not on the table—and Pham didn’t want to hint about it when others were present. He arranged a face-to-face meeting with Larson. It was the sort of thing that would have made sense even to Pham’s aunts and uncles back on medieval Canberra, though the technical subterfuge behind the meeting would have been unintelligible to them.

Six weeks after his landfall on Ytre, Pham Nuwen walked alone through the most exclusive open street in Dirby. Scattered clouds were reminders of the recent rain. They showed pink and gray in the bright twilight. The sun had just set in the deep heart of Trygve. Near the limb of the giant planet, an arch of gold and red was the memory of the sun’s passing into eclipse. The disk of the giant stood across ten degrees of sky. Silent blue lightning flickered in its polar latitudes.

The air was cool and moist, the breeze carrying some natural perfume. Pham kept up his pace, pulling the leash tight every time his snarlihunds wanted to investigate something off the promenade. His cover demanded that he take things slowly, enjoy the view, wave in a courtly way to the similarly dressed people who passed by. After all, what else would a rich, retired resident be doing out in the open but admiring the lights and showing off his hunds? That’s what his contact had claimed anyway. “Security on Huskestrade isn’t really tight. But if you don’t have an excuse to be there, the police may stop you. Take some prize snarlihunds. That’s legitimate reason to be on the promenade.”

Pham’s gaze took in the palaces that showed here and there through the foliage along the promenade. Dirby seemed like a peaceful place. There was security here… but if enough people wanted to pull things down, it could be done in a single night of fire and riot. The cartels played a hard commercial game, but their civilization was coasting through the highest, happiest of its good times…. Maybe “cartels” wasn’t even the right word. Gunnar Larson and some of the other magnates put on airs of deep, ancient wisdom. Larson was a boss man all right, but the word for his rank meant something more than that. Pham knew the term “philosopher king.” But Larson was a businessman. Maybe his title meant “philosopher-magnate.” Hmm.

Pham reached the Larson estate. He turned down a private offway that was almost as broad as the promenade. The output of his head-up display faded; after a few more paces, he had only a natural view. Pham was annoyed but not surprised. He walked on as if he owned the place, even let the hunds take a crap behind a two-meter stand of flowers.Let thephilosopher-magnate understand my deep respect for all the mystery.

“Please follow, Sir.” A voice came quietly from behind him. Pham suppressed a start, turned and nodded casually to the speaker. In the reddish twilight he couldn’t see any weapons. High in the sky and two million kilometers away, a chain of blue lightning flickered bright on the face of Trygve. He got a good look at his guide, and three others who had been hidden by the dark. They wore corporate robes, but he couldn’t miss the military bearing, or the huds they wore across their eyes.

He let them take the hunds. That was just as well. The four creatures were big and carnivore-looking mean. They might be overbred into gentleness, but it would take more than one twilight walk to make Pham a hund lover.

Pham and the remaining guards walked more than one hundred meters. He had a glimpse of delicately turned branches, moss that sat just so at joints of the roots. The higher the social position, the more these fellows went for rustic nature—and the more perfect every detail had to be. No doubt this “forest path” had been manicured for a century to capture untrammeled wildness.

The path opened onto a hillside garden, sitting above a stream and a pond. The reddish arch of Trygve was enough for him to make out the tables, the small human form that rose to greet him.

“Magnate Larson.” Pham gave the little half bow he had seen between equals. Larson reciprocated, and somehow Pham knew the other fellow was grinning.

“Fleet Captain Nuwen…. Please take a seat.”

There were cultures where trade couldn’t begin until everyone is bored unto death by irrelevant chitchat. Pham wasn’t expecting that here. He was due back in his hotel in 20Ksec—and it would be well for both of them if the other cartelists didn’t realize where Pham had been. Yet Gunnar Larson seemed in no hurry. Occasional Trygve lightning showed him: typical Ytre stock, but very old, the blondish hair thinning, the pale pink skin wrinkled. They sat in the flashing twilight for more than 2Ksec. The old man chatting about Pham’s history and the past of Trygve Ytre.Hell, maybe he’s gettingback at me for dumping in his flowers. Or maybe it was something Ytreisch inscrutable. On the bright side, the fellow spoke excellent Aminese and Pham wasn’t backward in that language either.

Larson’s estate was strangely quiet. Dirby city contained almost a million people, and though none of the buildings were monstrously tall, there was urbanization to within a thousand meters of the high-class Huskestrade section. Yet sitting here, the loudest sounds were Gunnar Larson’s inane chitchat—and the splashing of the little waterfall just down the hillside. Pham’s eyes were well adjusted now. He could see the reflection of Trygve’s arching light in the pond. He could see ripples when some large, shelled creature breached the surface. I’m actually coming to like the cycle of lighton Ytre. Three weeks ago Pham would have never thought that time could come. The nights and days were long beyond any rhythm Pham could sustain, but the midday eclipses gave some respite. And after a while you began to forget that almost every color was a shade of red. There was a comfortable safeness about this world; these people had kept a prosperous peace for almost a thousand years. So maybe there was wisdom here….

Abruptly, without breaking the cadence of triviality, Larson said, “So you think to learn the secret of Larson localizers?”

Pham knew his startled expression didn’t go beyond his eyes.

“First I would like to learn if such things exist. The rumors are very spectacular… and very vague.”

The old man’s teeth glinted in a smile. “Oh, they exist.” He gestured around them. “They give me eyes everywhere. They make this darkness into day.”

“I see.” The old man wasn’t wearing a head-up. Could he guess at the sardonic expression on Pham’s face?

Larson laughed softly. “Oh yes.” He touched his temple just behind the orbit of his eye. “There’s one resting right here. The others align on it and precisely stimulate my optic nerve. It takes a lot of practice on both sides. But if you have enough Larson localizers, they can handle the load. They can synthesize views from whatever direction I choose.” He made an obscure motion with his hands. “Your facial expressions are as clear as day to me, Pham Nuwen. And from the localizers that have dusted your hands and neck, I can even look inside. I can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe. With a little concentration”—he cocked his head—“I can estimate blood flow within regions of your brain…. You are sincerely surprised, young man.”

Pham’s lips tightened in anger at himself. The other had spent more than a Ksec calibrating him. If this had been in an office, away from this garden and this quiet darkness, he would have been much more on his guard. Pham shrugged. “Your localizers are far and away the most interesting thing about the current stage of Ytreisch civilization. I’m very interested in acquiring some samples—even more interested in the program base, and the factory specification.”

“To what end?”

“That should be obvious and irrelevant. The important thing is what I can give you in trade. Your medical science is poorer than at Namqem or Kielle.”

Larson seemed to nod. “It’s worse than we had here before the Fall. We’ve never recovered all the old secrets.”

“You called me ‘young man’,” said Pham, “but what is your own age, sir? Ninety? One hundred?” Pham and his staff had looked carefully at the Ytreisch net, gauging the locals’ medical science.

“Ninety-one of your thirty-Msec years,” said Larson.

“Well, sir, I have lived a hundred and twenty-seven years. That doesn’t count coldsleep, of course.” And I look like a young man.

Larson was silent for a long moment, and Pham was sure that he had scored a point. Maybe these “philosopher-magnates” weren’t so inscrutable.

“Yes, I would like to be young again. And millions would spend millions for the same. What can your medicine give?”

“A century or two, looking about as you see me. Two or three centuries after that, visibly aging.”

“Ah. That’s even a bit better than we achieved before the Fall. But the very old will look as bad and suffer as much as the old always have. There are intrinsic limits to how far the human body can be pushed.”

Pham was politely silent, but he smiled inside. Medicine was the hook, all right. Pham would get their localizers in return for decent medical science. Both sides would benefit enormously. Magnate Larson would live a few extra centuries. If he was lucky, the current cycle of his civilization would outlive him. But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did—a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers.

Larson was making a strange, soft sound. After a moment, Pham realized it was coughing laughter. “Ah, forgive me. You may be a hundred and twenty-seven years old, but you are still a young man in your mind. You hide behind the dark and an expressionless face—don’t be offended. You haven’t trained at the right disguises. With my localizers I see your pulse and the blood flow in your brain…. You think that someday you’ll dance on my grave, no?”

“I—“ Damn. An expert, using the very best invasive probes, couldn’t see that much about another’s attitude. Larson was just guessing—or the localizers were even more a treasure than Pham had thought. Pham’s awe and caution were tinged with anger. The other was mocking him. Well then, truly: “In a sense, yes. If you accept the trade I’m hoping for, you will live just as many years as I. But I am Qeng Ho. I sleep decades between the stars. You Customer civilizations are ephemera to us.” There. That should raise your blood pressure.

“Fleet Captain, you remind me a little of Fred down there in the pool. Again, no real insult intended. Fred is aluksterfiske.” He must be talking about the creature that Pham had noticed diving near the waterfall. “Fred is curious about lots of things. He’s been hopping around since you arrived, trying to figure you out. Can you see, right now he’s sitting at the edge of the pond? Two armored tentacles are tickling the grass about three meters from your feet.”

Pham felt a shock of surprise. He had thought those werevines. He followed the slender limbs back to the water… yes, there were four eye stalks, four unblinking eyes. They glittered yellow in the waning light of Trygve’s sky arch. “Fred has lived a long time. Archeologists have found his breeding documents, a little experiment with native wildlife just before the Fall. He was some rich man’s pet, about as smart as a hund. But Fred is very old. He lived through the Fall. He was something of a legend in these parts. You are right, Fleet Captain; if you live long enough you see much. In the Middle Ages, Dirby was first a ruin, then the beginning of a great kingdom—its lords mined the secrets of the earlier age, to their own great profit. For a time, this hillside was the senate of those rulers. During the Renaissance, this was a slum and the lake at the bottom of the hill an open sewer. Even the name ‘Huskestrade’—the epitome of high-class modern Dirby addresses—, once meant something like ‘Street of the Outhouses.’

“But Fred survived it all. He was the legend of the sewers, his existence disbelieved by sensible folk until three centuries ago. Now he lives with full honor—in the cleanest water.” There was fondness in the old man’s voice. “So Fred has lived long, and he’s seen much. He’s still intellectually alive, as much as aluksterfiske can be. Witness his beady eyes upon us. But Fred knows far less of the world and his own history than I do from reading history.”

“Not a valid analogy. Fred is a dumb animal.”

“True. You are a bright human and you fly between the stars. You live a few hundred years, but those years are spread across a span as great as Fred’s. What more do you really see? Civilizations rise and fall, but all technical civilizations know the greatest secrets now. They know which social mechanisms normally work, and which ones quickly fail. They know the means to postpone disaster and evade the most foolish catastrophes. They know that even so, each civilization must inevitably fall. The electronics that you want from me may not exist anywhere else in Human Space—but I’m sure that equipment that good has been invented by humans before, and will be again. Similarly for the medical technology you correctly assume we want from you. Humankind as a whole is in a steady state, even if our domain is slowly expanding. Yes, compared to you I am like a bug in the forest, alive for one day. But I see as much as you; I live as much as you. I can study my histories and the radio accounts that float between the stars. I can see all the variety of triumph and barbarism that you Qeng Ho do.”

“We gather the best. With us it never dies.”

“I wonder. There was another trading fleet that came to Trygve Ytre when I was a young man. They were totally unlike you. Different language, different culture. Interstellar traders are simply a niche, not a culture.” Sura argued that, too. Here, in this ancient garden, the quiet words seemed to weigh more heavily than when Sura Vinh spoke them; Gunnar Larson’s voice was almost hypnotic. “Those earlier traders did not have your airs, Fleet Captain. They hoped to make their fortune, to ultimately go somewhere else and set up a planetary civilization.”

“Then they would no longer be Traders.”

“True; perhaps they would be something more. You’ve been in many planetary systems. Your manifest says you’ve spent a number of years at Namqem, long enough to appreciate a planetary civilization. We have hundreds of millions of people living within a few light-seconds of each other. The local net that spans Trygve Ytre gives almost every citizen a view on Human Space that you can only have when you come to port…. More than anything, your trading life between the stars is a Ruritania of the Mind.”

Pham didn’t recognize the reference, but he got the other’s point. “Magnate Larson, I wonder that you want to live long. You have everything figured out—a universe free of progress, where all things die and no good is accumulated.” Pham’s words were partly sarcasm, partly honest puzzlement. Gunnar Larson had opened windows, and the view was bleak.

Barely audible, a sigh. “You don’t read very much, do you, son?” Strange. Pham did not think the other was probing anymore. There was something like sad amusement in the question.

“I read enough.” Sura herself complained that Pham spent too much time with manuals. But Pham had started late, and had spent his whole life trying to catch up. So what if his education was a little skewed?

“You ask me the real point of it all. Each of us must take his own path on that, Fleet Captain. Different paths have their own advantages, their own perils. But for your own, human, sake… you should consider: Each civilization has its time. Each science has its limits. And each of us must die, living less than half a thousand years. If you truly understand those limits… then you are ready to grow up, to know what counts.” He was silent for a while. “Yes… just listen to the peace. It’s a gift to be able to do that. Too much time is spent in frenzied rushing. Listen to the breeze in thelestras. Watch Fred try to figure us out. Listen to the laughter of your children and your grandchildren. Enjoy the time you have, however it is given to you, and for however long.”

Larson leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be staring out at the starless darkness that was the center of Trygve’s disk. The arch of light from the eclipsed sun was dim and uniform all around the disk. The lightning had long since vanished; Pham guessed that seeing it was some function of viewing angle and the orientation of Trygve’s thunderheads. “An example, Fleet Captain. Sit and feel and see: sometimes, at mid-eclipse, there is an especial beauty. Watch the middle of Trygve’s disk.” Seconds passed. Pham stared upward. Trygve’s lower latitudes were normally so dark… but now: There was faint red, first so dim that Pham thought it might just be a figment of suggestibility. The light brightened slowly, a deep, deep red, like sword steel still too cold for the hammer. There were bands of dark crossing it.

“The light is from the depths of Trygve itself. You know we get some direct warming from the planet. Sometimes, when the cloud canyons are oriented just right and the upper storms are gone, we have a very deep view—and we can see its glow with the naked eye.” The light came a little brighter. Pham glanced around the garden. Everything was in shades of red, but he could see more now than he had glimpsed in the lightning. The tall, stranded trees above the pond—they were part of the waterfall, guiding the water in extra swirls and pools. Clouds of flying things moved between the tree branches, and for a few moments they sang. Fred had climbed all the way out of the pond. He sat on multiple leg paddles and his shorter tentacles twitched upward, toward the light in the sky.

They watched in silence. Pham had observed Trygve with multispec on the way in from the asteroids. He wasn’t seeing anything now that was news to him. The whole show was just a happenstance of geometry and timing. And yet… being tied to a single place, on a course that was determined beyond human control, he could see how Customers might be impressed when the universe chose to reveal something. It was ridiculous, but he could feel some of the awe himself.

And then Trygve’s heart was dark again and the singing in the trees died away; the whole show had lasted less than one hundred seconds.

It was Larson who broke the silence. “I’m sure we can do business, my young-old man. In a measure I shouldn’t reveal, we do want your medical technology. But still, I would be grateful for your answer to my original question. What will you do with the Larson localizers? Among the unsuspecting, they are an espionage miracle. Abused, they lead to ubiquitous law enforcement, and a quick end to civilization. Who will you sell them to?”

For some reason, Pham answered him frankly. As the eastern limb of Trygve slowly brightened, Pham explained his vision of empire, the empire of all Humankind. It was something that he had never told a mere Customer. It was something he told only certain Qeng Ho, the ones who seemed the brightest and the most flexible. Even then, most could not accept the whole plan. Most were like Sura, rejecting Pham’s real goal, but more than willing to profit from a genuine Qeng Ho culture…. “So, we may keep the localizers to ourselves. It will cost us trade, but there is anedge we need over the Customer civilizations. The common language, the synchronized voyage plans, our public databases—all those things will give our Qeng Ho a cohesive culture. But tricks like these localizers will take us a step beyond that. In the end, we will not be random occupiers of the ‘trading niche’; we will be the surviving culture of Humankind.”

Larson was silent for a long moment. “It’s a marvelous dream you have, son,” Larson said. The obscure amusement was gone from his voice. “A League of Humankind, breaking the wheel of time. I’m sorry, I cannot believe we’ll ever reach the summit of your dream. But the foothills, the lower slopes of it… those are something marvelous, and perhaps attainable. The bright times could be brighter and they could last longer….”

Larson was an extraordinary person, customer or no. But for whatever reason, he had the same blinders as Sura Vinh. Pham slumped back onto the soft wooden bench. After a moment, Larson continued. “You’re disappointed. You respected me enough to hope for more. You see rightly about many things, Fleet Captain. You see marvelously clear for someone from… Ruritania.” His voice seemed to smile gently. “You know, my family’s lineage is two thousand years deep. That’s a blink of the Trader’s eye—but only because Traders spend most of their time in sleep. And beyond the wisdom we have gathered directly, I and those before me have read of other places and times, a hundred worlds, a thousand civilizations. There are things about your ideas that could work. There are things about your ideas that are more plausibly hopeful than anything since the Age of Failed Dreams. I think I have insights that could be helpful….”

They talked through the rest of the eclipse, as the eastern limb of Trygve brightened, and the sun’s disk formed out of the planet’s depths and climbed toward open sky. The sky brightened into blue. And still they talked. Now it was Gunnar Larson who had the most to say. He was trying to be clear, and Pham was recording what the old man said. But maybe Aminese was not such a perfect mutual language as he thought; there was a lot of it that Pham never understood.

Along the way, they hit a deal for Pham’s entire medical manifest, and for the Larson localizers. There were other items—a breeding sample of the mid-eclipse song creatures—but overall the trading was very easy. There was so much benefit going in both directions… and Pham was overwhelmed by the other things that Gunnar Larson had to say, the advice that might be worthless but that had the stench of wisdom.

Pham’s voyage to Trygve Ytre was one of the more profitable of his trading career, but it was that dark-red conversation with the Ytreisch mystic that stuck the deepest in Pham Nuwen’s memory. Afterward, he was certain Larson had used some kind of psychoactive drugs on him; Pham could never have been so suggestible otherwise. But… maybe it didn’t matter. Gunnar Larson had had good ideas—the ones Pham could understand, anyway. That garden and the sense of peace that surrounded it—those were powerful, impressive things. Coming back from Trygve Ytre, Pham understood the peace that came from a living garden, and he understood the power of the mereappearance of wisdom. The two insights could be combined. Biologicals had always been a critical trade item… but now they would be more. The new Qeng Ho would have an ethic of living things at its heart. Every vehicle that could support a park should have one. The Qeng Ho would gather the best of living things as fanatically as they did the best of technology. That part of the old man’s advice had been very clear. Qeng Ho would have a reputation for understanding living things, for a timeless attachment to nature.

Thus were the park and bonsai traditions born. The parks were a major overhead, but in the millennia since Trygve Ytre, they had become the deepest and most loved of all the Qeng Ho traditions.

And Trygve Ytre and Gunnar Larson? Larson was millennia dead, of course. The civilization at Ytre had barely outlived the man. There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror. Most likely, Larson’s own localizers had precipitated the end. All the wisdom, all the inscrutability, hadn’t helped his world much.

Pham shifted in his sleep hammock. Thinking about Ytre and Larson always left him uneasy. It was wasted time… except tonight. Tonight he needed the mood of the time after that meeting. He needed something of the kinesthetic memory of dealing with the localizers. There must be dozens in this room by now. What was the pattern of motion and body state that would trigger them to talk back to him? Pham pulled the hammock wrap fully over his hands. Inside, his fingers played at a phantom keyboard. Surely that was too obvious. Until he had rapport, nothing like keystrokes should have an effect. Pham sighed, changed breathing and pulse yet again… and recaptured the awe of his first practice sessions with the Larson localizers.

A pale blue light, bluer than blue, blinked once near the edge of his vision. Pham opened his eyes a slit. The room was midnight dark. The light from the sleep panel was too faint to reveal colors. Nothing moved except the slow drifting of his hammock in the ventilator’s breeze. The blue light had been from elsewhere. From inside his optic nerve. Pham closed his eyes, repeated the breathing exercise. The blue, blinking light appeared once more. It was the effect of a localizer array’s synthesized beam, guiding off the two he had set by his temple and in his ear. As communication went, it was very crude, no more impressive than the random sparkles that most people ignore all the time. The system was programmed to be very cautious about revealing itself. This time he kept his eyes closed, and didn’t change the level of his breath or the calmness of his pulse. He curled two fingers toward his palm. A second passed. The light blinked again, responding. Pham coughed, waited, moved his right arm just so. The blue light blinked: One, Two, Three… it was a pulse train, counting binary for him. He echoed back to it, using the codes that he had set up long ago.

He was past the challenge/response module.He was in! The lights that flickered behind his eyes were almost random stimuli. It would take Ksecs to train the localizer net to the precision that this sort of display could have. The optic nerve was simply too large, too complex for instantly clear video. No matter. The net was reliably talking to him now. The old customizations were coming out of hiding. The localizers had established his physical parameters; he could talk to them in any number of ways from now on. He had almost 3Msec remaining in his current Watch. That should be time enough to do the absolutely necessary, to invade the fleet net and establish a new cover story. What would it be? Something shameful, yes. Some shameful reason for “Pham Trinli” to play the buffoon all these years. A story that Nau and Brughel could relate to and think to use as a lever against him. What?

Pham felt a smile steal across his face.Zamle Eng, may your slave-trading soul rot in Hell. You caused me so much grief. Maybe you can dome some posthumous good.

TWENTY-THREE

“The Children’s Hour of Science.” What an innocent name. Ezr returned from his long off-Watch to find that it had become his personal nightmare.Qiwi promised; how could she let this happen? But every live show was more of a circus than the last.

And today’s might be the worst yet. With good luck it might also be the last.

Ezr drifted into Benny’s about a thousand seconds before show time. Till the last moment, he’d intended to watch it from his room, but masochism had won another round. He settled into the crowd and listened silently to the chatter.

Benny’s booze parlor had become the central institution of their existence at L1. The parlor was sixteen years old now. Benny himself was on a twenty-five-percent duty cycle; he and his father shared the running of the place with Gonle Fong and others. The old wallpaper had blistered in places, and in some places the illusion of three-dimensional view was lost. Everything here was unofficial, either appropriated from other sites in the L1 cloud, or made from diamonds and ice and airsnow. Ali Lin had even come up with a fungal matrix that allowed the growing of incredible wood, complete with grain and something like growth rings. Sometime during Ezr’s long absence, the bar and the walls had all been paneled in dark, polished wood. It was a comfortable place, almost what free Qeng Ho might make….

The parlor’s tables were carved with the names of people you might not have seen for years, people on Watch shifts that didn’t overlap your own. The picture above the bar was a continuously updated copy of Nau’s Watch Chart. As with most things, the Emergents used standard Qeng Ho notation. A single glance at the chart and you could see how many Msecs—objective time or personal—it would be before you ever met any particular person.

During Ezr’s off-Watch, Benny had added to the Watch Chart. Now it showed the current Spider date, in Trixia’s notation: 60//21. The twenty-first year of the current Spider “generation,” which was the sixtieth sun-cycle since the founding of some dynasty or other. There was an old Qeng Ho saying, “You know you’ve stayed too long when you start using the locals’ calendar.” 60//21. Twenty-one years since the Relight, since Jimmy and the others had died. After the generation and year number, there were the day number and the time in Ladille “hours” and “minutes,” a base-sixty system that the translators had never bothered to rationalize. And now everyone who came to the bar could read those times as easily as they could read a Qeng Ho chron. They knew to the second when Trixia’s show would begin.

Trixia’s show.Ezr ground his teeth hard together. A public slave show, and the worst of it was that no one seemed to care.Bit by bit, we arebecoming Emergents.

Jau Xin and Rita Liao and half a dozen other couples—two of them Qeng Ho—were clustered around their usual tables, babbling about what might happen today. Ezr sat at the periphery of the group, fascinated and repelled. Nowadays, even some of the Emergents were his friends. Jau Xin, for instance. Xin and Liao had much of the Emergent moral blindness, but they also had touching, human problems. And sometimes, when no one else might notice, Ezr saw something in Xin’s eyes. Jau was bright, academically inclined. Except for his good luck in the Emergent lottery, his university days would have ended in Focus. Most Emergents could double-think their way around such things; sometimes Jau could not.

“—so afraid this will be the last show,” Rita Liao looked genuinely distraught.

“Don’t gloom on it, Rita. We don’t even know if this is a serious problem.”

“That’s for sure.” Gonle Fong drifted in headfirst, from above. She distributed flasks of Diamonds and Ice all around. “I think the zipheads—” She glanced apologetically at Ezr. “—I think the translators have finally lost it. The ads for this show just don’t make any sense.”

“No, no. They’re really quite clear.” It was one of the Emergents, with a fairly good explanation of what the “out-of-phase perversion” was all about. The problem wasn’t with the translators; the problem was with the human ability to accept the bizarre.

“The Children’s Hour of Science” had been one of the first voice broadcasts that Trixia and the others had translated. Just mapping audio to the previously translated written forms had been a triumph. The early shows—fifteen objective years ago—had been printed translations. They’d been discussed in Benny’s parlor, but with the same abstract interest as the latest ziphead theories about the OnOff star. As the years passed, the show had become popular for itself.Fine. But sometime in the last 50Msec, Qiwi Lin had worked a deal with Trud Silipan. Every nine or ten days, Trixia and the other translators were put on exhibit, a live show. So far this Watch, Ezr hadn’t spoken more than ten words to Qiwi.She promised to look afterTrixia. What do you say to someone who breaks such a promise? Even now, he didn’t believe Qiwi was a traitor. But she was in bed with Tomas Nau. Maybe she used that “position” to protect Qeng Ho interests. Maybe. In the end, it all seemed to benefit Nau.

Ezr had seen four “performances” now. More than any normal human translator, far more than any machine system, each ziphead put emotion and body language into the interpretation.

“Rappaport Digby” was the zipheads’ name for the show’s host. (Wheredo they get those crazy names?People still asked that. Ezr knew the names came mostly from Trixia. That was one of the few things he and Trixia could really talk about, his knowledge of the First Classicism. Sometimes she asked him for new words. In fact,Ezr had suggested the “Digby” name, years ago. The word fit something she saw in the background of this particular Spider.) Ezr knew the translator who played Rappaport Digby. Outside of the show, Zinmin Broute was a typical ziphead, irritable, fixated, uncommunicative. But now, when he appeared as the Spider Rappaport Digby, he was kindly and garrulous, a patient explainer to children…. It was like seeing a zombie briefly animated by someone else’s soul.

Each new Watch saw the Spider children a little differently. After all, most Watches were only a twenty-five-percent duty cycle; the Spider children lived four years for every one that most spacers lived. Rita and some of the others took to visualizing human children to go with the voices. The pictures were scattered across the parlor’s wallpaper. Pictures of imaginary human children, with the names Trixia had chosen. “Jirlib” was short, with tousled dark hair and a mischievous smile. “Brent” was larger, not as cocky-looking as his brother. Benny had told him how Ritser Brughel once replaced the smiling faces with pictures of real Spiders: low-slung, skeletal, armored—images from the statuary Ezr had seen in his landing on Arachna, supplemented with low-res pics from the snoopersats.

Brughel’s vandalism hadn’t mattered; he didn’t understand what was behind the popularity of “The Children’s Hour.” Tomas Nau obviouslydid understand, and was perfectly content that the customers at Benny’s booze parlor could sublimate the greatest personnel problem his little kingdom faced. Even more than the Qeng Ho expedition, the Emergents had expected to live in luxury. They had expected that there would be ever-expanding resources, that marriages planned at home could result in children and families here in the OnOff system….

Now all that was postponed.Our own out-of-phase taboo. Couples like Xin and Liao had only their dreams for the future—and the children’s words and children’s thoughts that came from the translation of “The Children’s Hour.”

Even before the live shows, the humans noticed that all the children were the same age. Year by Arachnan year they aged, but when new children came on the show, they were the same age as those replaced. The earliest translations had been lessons about magnetism and static electricity, all free of mathematics. Later the lessons introduced analysis and quantitative methods.

About two years ago, there had been a subtle change, remarked on in the ziphead’s written reports—and instantly, instinctively noticed by Jau Xin and Rita Liao: “Jirlib” and “Brent” had appeared on the show. They were introduced as any other children, but Trixia’s translations made them seemyounger than the others. Showmaster Digby never remarked on the difference, and the math and science in the show continued to become more sophisticated.

“Victory Junior” and “Gokna” were the latest additions to the cast, new on this Watch. Ezr had seen Trixia play them. Her voice had hopped with childish impatience; sometimes she had bubbled with laughter. Rita’s pictures showed these two Spiders as laughing seven-year-olds. It was all too pat. Why should the average age of children on the show be declining? Benny claimed the explanation was obvious. “The Children’s Hour” must be under new management. The ubiquitous Sherkaner Underhill was credited with writing the lessons now. And Underhill was apparently the father of all the new children.

By the time Ezr had returned from coldsleep, the show was packing the parlor to capacity. Ezr saw four performances, each a private horror for him. And then, surcease. “The Children’s Hour” had not been broadcast for twenty days now. Instead, there had been a stern announcement: “After numerous listener allegations, the owners of this broadcasting station have determined that the family of Sherkaner Underhill practices the out-of-phase perversion. Pending resolution of this situation, broadcasts of ‘The Children’s Hour of Science’ are suspended.” Broute had read the announcement with a voice quite unlike that of Rappaport Digby. The new voice was cold and distant, and full of indignation.

For once, the alienness of Arachna penetrated all the glib wishful thinking. So Spider tradition only allowed new children at the beginning of a New Sun. Generations were strictly separated, each marching through life as a same-aged group. The humans had only guesses for why this should be the case, but apparently “The Children’s Hour” had been a cover for a major violation of the taboo. The show missed one scheduled broadcast, two. In Benny’s booze parlor, things were sad and empty; Rita began to talk of taking down the silly pictures. And Ezr began to hope that maybe this was the end of the circus.

But that was too much to hope. Four days ago, the gloom had abruptly lifted, even if the mystery remained. Broadcasts from radio stations all across the “Goknan Accord” announced that a spokesman for the Church of the Dark would meet in debate with Sherkaner Underhill about the “propriety” of his radio show. Trud Silipan had promised that the zipheads would be ready, able to translate this new show format.

Now Benny’s show-time clock was counting down the seconds to this special edition of “The Children’s Hour.”

In his usual place on the other side of the parlor, Trud Silipan seemed to ignore the suspense. He and Pham Trinli were talking in low tones. The two were constant drinking buddies, planning great deals that never seemed to go anywhere.Funny, I used to think Trinli was a loud buffoon. Pham’s “magic localizer” claims had not been a bluff; Ezr had noticed the dustmotes. Nau and Brughel had begun using the gadgets. Somehow, Pham Trinli had known a secret about the localizers that had been missing from the innermost sections of the fleet library. Ezr Vinh might be the only one to realize it, but Pham Trinli was not totally a buffoon. More and more, Ezr guessed that the old man was in no part a fool. There were secrets hidden all through the fleet library; there had to be in anything that old and that large. But for a secret that important to be known by this man… Pham Trinli must go back along way.

“Hey, Trud!” shouted Rita, pointing at the clock. “Where are your zipheads?” The parlor’s wallpaper still looked out on the forests of some Balacrean nature preserve.

Trud Silipan rose from his table and floated down before the crowd. “It’s okay, folks. I just got word. Princeton Radio has started the ‘Children’s Hour’ intro. Director Reynolt will bring out the zipheads in a moment. They’re still synching with the word stream.”

Liao’s irritation melted away. “Great! Good going, Trud.”

Silipan gave a bow, accepting kudos for what was a zero contribution on his part. “So, in a few moments we should know what strange things this Underhill creature has been doing with his children….” He cocked his head, listening to his private data feed. “And here they are!”

The dripping, blue-green forest landscape disappeared. The bar side of the room suddenly seemed to extend into one of the meeting rooms down on Hammerfest. Anne Reynolt slid in from the right, her form distorted by the perspective angle; that part of the wallpaper just couldn’t handle 3D. Behind Reynolt came a couple of technicians and five zipheads… Focused persons. One of those was Trixia.

This was where Ezr wanted to start screaming—or run off to some dark place and pretend the world didn’t exist. Normally the Emergents hid their zipheads deep within their systems, as if they felt some remnant shame. Normally the Emergents liked to get results from computer and head-up displays, all graphics and hygienically filtered data. Benny had told him that in the beginning Qiwi’s freak show had just been the zipheads’ voices piped into the parlor. Then Trud told everyone about the translators’ byplay, and the show went visual. Surely the zipheads couldn’t intuit body language from a Spider audio. That didn’t seem to matter; the byplay might be nonsense, but it was what the ghouls around him wanted.

Trixia was dressed in loose fatigues. Her hair floated out, partly tangled. Ezr had combed it sleek less than 40Ksec earlier. She shrugged off her handlers and grabbed the edge of a table. She was looking this way and that, and mumbling to herself. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her fatigue blouse and pulled herself down to a chair restraint. The others followed her, looking as abstracted as Trixia. Most were wearing huds. Ezr knew the sort of thing they were seeing and hearing, the midlevel transduction of the Spider language. That was Trixia’s entire world.

“We’re synched, Director,” one of the techs said to Reynolt.

The Emergent Director for Human Resources floated down the rank of slaves, moving the fidgeting zipheads about for reasons that Ezr couldn’t guess. After all this time, Ezr knew the woman had a special talent. She was a stone-eyed bitch, but she knew how to get results from zipheads.

“Okay, start ’em running—” She moved up, out of the way. Zinmin Broute had risen against his seat, and was already speaking in his ponderous announcer’s voice. “My name is Rappaport Digby, and this is ‘The Children’s Hour of Science.’…”

Daddy took them all to the radio station that day. Jirlib and Brent were up on the top deck of the car, acting very serious and grown-up—and they looked near enough to in-phase that they didn’t attract attention. Rhapsa and Little Hrunk were still tiny enough to perch in Daddy’s fur; it might be another year before they rejected being called the babies of the family.

Gokna and Victory Junior sat in the back, each on her separate perch. Victory stared out through the smoky glass at the streets of Princeton. This all made her feel a little like royalty. She tilted her head slyly in her sister’s direction; maybe Gokna was her handmaiden.

Gokna sniffed imperiously. They were alike enough that she was certainly thinking the same thing—with herself as Great Ruler. “Daddy, if you’re doing the show today, why are we even along?”

Daddy laughed. “Oh, you never know. The Church of the Dark thinks they own the Right. But I wonder if their debater even knows any out-of-phase children. Underneath all the indignation, she might be likable. In person, she might not be able to breathe fire on little ones just because they aren’t the right age.”

That was possible. Victory thought of Uncle Hrunk, who hated the idea of their family… and loved them at the same time.

The car drove through crowded streets, up the crosstown avenue that led to the radio hills. Princeton Station was the oldest in the city—Daddy said it began broadcasting before the last Dark, when it was a military radio station. In this generation, the owners had built on the original foundations. They could have had their studios in town, but they made a big thing of their great tradition. So the drive to the station was exciting, wrapping round and round a hill that was the tallest ever, much taller than even the one they lived on. Outside, there was still morning frost on the ground. Victory pushed over onto Gokna’s perch and the two swayed out for a better look. This was the middle of winter, and they were almost to the Middle Years of the Sun, but this was only the second time they had seen frost. Gokna jabbed a hand out toward the east. “Look, we’re high enough now—you can see the Craggies!”

“And there’s snow on them!” The two squealed the words together. But the distant glint was really the color of morning frost. It might be a couple more years before firstsnow came to the Princeton area, even in midwinter. What would it be like to walk in snow? What would it be like to fall in a drift of it? For a moment, the two pondered the questions, forgetting the other events of the day—the radio debate that had preoccupied everyone, even the General, for the last ten days.

At first, all of the cobblies and especially Jirlib had been afraid of this debate. “It’s the end of the show,” their elder brother said. “Now the public knows about us.” The General had come up from Lands Command especially to tell them there was nothing to worry about, that Daddy would take care of the complaints. But she didn’t say they would get their radio show back again. General Victory Smith was used to briefing troops and staff. She didn’t quite have the knack for reassuring children. Secretly, Gokna and Victory thought that maybe this flap about the radio show made Mom more nervous than any of the wartime adventures that lurked in her past.

Daddy was the only one who wasn’t caught in the gloom. “This is what I’ve been waiting for all along,” he told Mom when she came up from Lands Command. “It’s more than time to go public. This debate will bring lots of things out into the open.” Those were the same ideas that Mom spoke of, but from Daddy they sounded joyous. The last ten days, he had been playing with them even more than usual. “You’re my special experts for this debate, so I can spend all my time with you and still be the dutiful worker.” He had sidled dolefully from side to side, pretending to work at an invisible job. The babies had loved it, and even Jirlib and Brent seemed to accept their father’s optimism. The General had departed for the south the night before; as usual, she had lots more to worry about than family problems.

The top of Radio Hill was above the tree line. Low furze covered the ground by the parking circle. The children got out, marveling at the chill that was still in the air. Little Victory felt an odd burning all along her breathing passages, as if… as if frost was forming there. Was that possible?

“Come along children. Gokna, don’t gawk.” Daddy and his older sons herded them up the broad old steps of the station. The stone was flame-pitted and unpolished, like the owners wanted people to think they represented some ancient tradition.

The walls inside were hung with photo-impressions, portraits of the owners and the inventors of radio (the same people, in this case). All of them except Rhapsa and Hrunk had been here before. Jirlib and Brent had been doing the radio show for two years, taking over from the in-phase children when Daddy bought the show’s franchise. Both boys sounded older than they really were, and Jirlib was smart as most adults. Nobody had seemed to suspect their true age. Daddy had been a little irritated by that. “I want people to guess on their own—but they’re too foolish to imagine the truth!” So finally, Gokna and Victory Junior had been added to the show. That had been fun, pretending to be years older, playing up to the dumb scripts they used on the show. And Mr. Digby had been nice, even if he was no real scientist.

Still, both Gokna and Junior still had very young-sounding voices. Eventually, someone had overcome their faith in the goodness of all radio broadcasts, and realized that serious perversion was being flaunted across the public’s maw. But Princeton Radio was privately owned, and more important, it owned its patch of spectrum and had interference easements on nearby bands. The owners were Generation 58 cobbers who were still counting their money. Unless the Church of the Dark could make an effective listener boycott, Princeton Radio was going to keep “The Children’s Hour.” Hence this debate.

“Ah, Dr. Underhill, such a pleasure!” Madame Subtrime came sweeping out of her cubicle. The station manager was all legs and pointy hands, with a body scarcely bigger than her head. Gokna and Viki got plenty of laughs imitating her. “You won’t believe the interest this debate has generated. We are forwarding to the East Coast, and copies will be on the shortwave. I tell you without exaggeration, we have listeners from justall over!”

I tell you without exaggeration… Hidden from the manager, Gokna waggled her mouth parts in time with the words. Viki kept her own aspect prim, and pretended not to notice.

Daddy tipped his head to the manager. “I’m glad to be so popular, Madame.”

“Oh, yes, indeed! We’ve got sponsors killing each other for the slots in this time. Simply killing each other!” She smiled down at the children. “I’ve arranged that you can watch from our engineer’s loft.”

They all knew where that was, but they followed obediently along, listening to her unending gush. None of them really knew what Madame Subtrime thought of them. Jirlib claimed that she was no fool, that under all the words lurked a cold counter of cash. “She knows to the tenth-penny how much she can earn for the old cobbers by outraging the public.” Maybe, but Viki liked her even so, and even forgave her shrill and foolish talk. Too many people were so stuck on their beliefs that nothing would bend them.

“Didi’s on duty this hour. You know her.” Madame Subtrime stopped at the entrance to the engineer’s loft. For the first time she seemed to notice the babies peeking out of Sherkaner Underhill’s fur. “My, you do have all ages, don’t you? I… will they be safe with your children? I don’t know who else could take care of them.”

“Quite all right, Madame. I intend to introduce Rhapsa and Little Hrunk to the representative of the Church.”

Madam Subtrime froze. For a full second, all the fidgety legs and hands were simultaneously motionless. It was the first time Viki had seen her really,really taken aback. Then her body relaxed into a slow, broad smile. “Dr. Underhill! Has anyone ever told you you’re a genius?”

Daddy grinned back. “Never with such good reason…. Jirlib, make sure everyone stays in the room with Didi. If I want you to come out, you’ll know it.”

The cobblies climbed into the engineering loft. Didire Ultmot was slouched on her usual perch overlooking the controls. A thick glass wall separated the room from the soundstage itself. It was soundproof, and darned hard to see through, too. The children edged close to the glass. There was someone already perched on the stage.

Didire waved a hand at them. “That’s the Church’s rep out there. The cobber came an hour early.” Didi was her usual, faintly impatient, self. She was a very good-looking twenty-one-year-old. Didi wasn’t as smart as some of Daddy’s students, but she was bright. She was Princeton Radio’s chief technician. At fourteen she had been a prime-time operator, and knew as much about electrical engineering as Jirlib. In fact, she wanted to become an electrical engineer. All that had come across the first time Jirlib and Brent met her, back when they started on the show. Viki remembered the strange way Jirlib had acted when he told them about that meeting; he seemed almost in awe of the Didire creature. She was nineteen then, and Jirlib was twelve… but big for his age. It took her two shows to realize that Jirlib was out-of-phase. She had taken the surprise as an intentional, personal insult. Poor Jirlib walked around like his legs were broken for a few days. He got over it—after all, there would be worse rejections in the future.

Didire more or less got over it, too. As long as Jirlib kept his distance, she was civil. And sometimes, when she forgot herself, Didi was more fun than any current-generation person that Viki knew. When they weren’t onstage, she would let Viki and Gokna sit by her perch and watch her tweak the dozens of controls. Didire was very proud of her control panel. In fact—except that the frame was furniture wood and not sheet metal—it looked almost as scientific as some of the gear at Hill House.

“So what’s this church cobber like?” asked Gokna. She and Viki had pressed their main eyes flat against the glass wall. The glass was so thick that lots of colors could not penetrate. The stranger perched onstage could have been dead for all the far-red you could see of her.

Didi shrugged. “Name’s ‘Honored Pedure.’ She talks funny. I think she’s a Tiefer. And that cleric’s shawl she’s wearing? It’s not just our crummy view from the control room: that shawl really isdark, across all colors but the farthest reds.”

Hmm. Expensive. Mom had a dress uniform like that, only most people never saw her in it.

A wicked smile grew across Didi’s aspect. “I bet she pukes when she sees the babies in your father’s fur.”

No such luck. But when Sherkaner Underhill came in a few seconds later, the Honored Pedure stiffened under her shapeless cowl. A second later, Rappaport Digby trotted onto the stage and grabbed an earphone. Digby had been with “The Children’s Hour” from the beginning, long before Jirlib and Brent had started on the show. He was an old coot, and Brent claimed he was really one of the station owners. Viki didn’t believe it, not after the way Didi sassed him.

“Okay, everybody.” Didi’s voice came amplified now. Daddy and the Honored Pedure straightened, each hearing the words from the speaker on their side. “We’re coming up on fifteen seconds. Will you be ready, Master Digby, or should I play some dead air?”

Digby’s snout was stuck in a wad of written notes. “Laugh if you like, Miss Ultmot, but air time is money. One way or another, I will—”

“Three, two, one—” Didi cut her speaker and stabbed a long, pointed hand in Digby’s direction.

The cobber picked up his cue as if he’d been waiting in patient alertness. His words had the usual smooth dignity, the trademark that had introduced the show for more than fifteen years: “My name is Rappaport Digby, and this is ‘The Children’s Hour of Science.’…”

When Zinmin Broute spoke in translation, his motions were no longer fitful and compulsive. He looked directly forward and smiled or frowned with emotions that seemed very real. And maybe they were real—for some armored spider creature down on the surface of Arachna. Occasionally there was some hesitation, a glitch in the intermediate conversions. Even more rarely, Broute would turn away, perhaps when some important cue appeared off-center in his head-up. But unless you knew what to look for, the fellow seemed to be speaking as fluently as any human announcer reading from notes written in his birth language.

Broute as Digby began with a little self-congratulatory history of the radio program, then described the shadow that had fallen upon it in recent days. “Out of phase,” “perversion of birth.” Broute rattled off the words as if he’d known them all his life. “This afternoon, we are back on the air as promised. The charges made in recent days are grave. Ladies and gentlemen, these charges of themselves are true.”

The silence was a dramatic three beat, and then: “So my friends, you may wonder what gave us the courage—or the impudence—to return. For the answer to that, I ask you to listen to this afternoon’s edition of ‘The Children’s Hour.’ Whether we continue in the future will largely depend on your reactions to what you hear today….”

Silipan snorted. “What a money-grubbing hypocrite.” Xin and the others waved at him to shut up. Trud sailed over to sit beside Ezr. This had happened before; he seemed to think that because Ezr sat at the edge, somehow he wanted to hear Silipan’s analysis.

Beyond the wallpaper, Broute was introducing the debaters. Silipan anchored a comp to his knee and flipped it open. It was a clumsy Emergent thing, but it had ziphead support and that made it more effective than anything Humankind had created before. He punched the Explain key and a tiny voice gave him background: “Officially, the Honored Pedure represents the traditional Church. In fact—” The voice coming from Trud’s comp paused, presumably while hardware searched databases. “—Pedure is a foreigner to the Goknan Accord. She’s probably an agent of the Kindred government.”

Xin looked around at them, momentarily losing track of Broute-Digby. “Pus, these people take their fundamentalism seriously. Does Underhill know about this?”

The voice from Trud’s hand comp replied. “It’s possible. ‘Sherkaner Underhill’ is strongly correlated with Accord’s security communications…. To date, we haven’t seen any military message traffic discussing this debate, but the Spider civilization is not yet well automated. There could be things we’re missing.”

Trud spoke to the device: “I have a lowest-pri background task for you. What would the Kindred want from this debate?” He glanced up at Jau and shrugged. “Dunno if we’ll get any answer. Things are pretty busy.”

Broute was almost done with his introductions. Honored Pedure was to be played by a Xopi Reung. Xopi was a thin little Emergent. Ezr knew her name only from studying rosters and talking to Anne Reynolt.I wonder ifanyone else here knows the woman’s name? thought Ezr. Certainly not Jau and Rita. Trud would, just as a livestock herder in primitive times would know his property. Xopi Reung was young; she had been brought out of the freezer to replace what Silipan called “a senility failure.” Reung had been on-Watch for about 40Msec. She was responsible for most of the progress in learning other Spider languages, in particular “Tiefic.” And she was already the second-best translator of “Standard Accord” speech. Someday, she might very well be better than Trixia. In a sane world, Xopi Reung would have been a premier academic, famous across her solar system. But Xopi Reung had been selected in the Podmaster Lottery. While Xin and Liao and Silipan led fully conscious lives, Xopi Reung was part of the automation in the walls, unseen except for the occasional peculiar circumstance.

Xopi Reung spoke: “Thank you, Master Digby. The Radio of Princeton secures itself proud by giving us this time to talk.” During Broute’s introduction, Reung’s attention had flickered all around, birdlike. Perhaps her huds were out of adjustment, or maybe she preferred to scatter important cues all about her visual field. But when she started talking, something feral came into her eyes.

“Not a very good translation,” someone complained.

“She’s new, remember,” said Trud.

“Or maybe this Pedure really does talk funny. You said she’s a foreigner.”

Reung-as-Pedure leaned out over the table. Her voice came silky and low. “Twenty days ago, we all discovered a corruption afester in what millions of people had been taking for years into their homes, into their husbands’ and children’s ears.” She continued for several moments, speaking awkward sentences that seemed very self-righteous. Then: “So it is fitting that the Radio of Princeton should now give us opportunity to cleanse the community’s air.” She paused, “I—I—” It was as though she couldn’t think of the right words. For an instant she seemed the ziphead again, fidgeting, her head cocked. Then abruptly she slammed her palm against the surface of the table. She pulled herself down to her chair and shut up.

“I told you, that one’s not much of a translator.”

TWENTY-FOUR

By leaning hands and forelegs on the wall, Viki and Gokna could keep their main eyes against the glass. It was an awkward pose, and the two skittered back and forth along the base of the window.

“Thank you, Master Digby. The Radio of Princeton secures itself proud by—” blah blah blah.

“She talks funny,” said Gokna.

“I already told you that. She’s a foreigner.” Didire spoke abstractedly. She was busy with some arcane adjustment of her equipment. She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what was actually being said on the soundstage. Brent was watching the show with stolid fascination, while Jirlib alternated between the window and standing as close as he could to Didi. He was well cured of giving her technical advice, but he still liked to stand close. Sometimes he would ask an appropriately naive question. When Didi wasn’t busy, that usually got her talking to him.

Gokna grinned at Viki. “No. I meant ‘Honored Pedure’ talks like a bad joke.”

“Hm.” Viki wasn’t so sure. Pedure’s clothing was strange, of course. She hadn’t seen cleric shawls outside of books. It was a shapeless cloak that came down on every side, obscuring all but Pedure’s head and maw. But she had an impression of strength under cover. Viki knew what most people thought of children such as herself. Pedure was just a full-time advocate of that view, right? But her speech had a certain menace…. “Do you think she really believes what she’s saying?”

“Sure she believes it. That’s what makes her so funny. See how Daddy’s smiling?” Sherkaner Underhill was perched on the other side of the sound-stage, quietly petting his babies. He hadn’t said a word yet, but there was a faint smile twitching across him. Two pairs of baby eyes peered fearfully out from his fur. Rhapsa and Hrunk couldn’t understand everything that was going on, but they looked frightened.

Gokna noticed, too. “Poor babies. They’re the only ones she can scare. Watch! I’m gonna Give Ten to the Honored Pedure.” She turned away from the window and ran to the side wall—and then up the rack of audio tapes. The girls were seven years old, much too big for acrobatics.Oops. The rack was freestanding. It swayed out from the wall, tapes and assorted junk sliding to the edge of each shelf. Gokna reached the top before anyone but Viki realized what was happening. And from there she leaped out, grabbing the top molding of the soundstage window. The rest of her body swung down against the glass with a solidsplat sound. For an instant, she was a perfect Ten splayed out across the window. On the far side of the glass, Pedure stared in stupefied shock. The two girls shrieked with laughter. It wasn’t often you could give such a perfect Ten, flaring your underwear in the target’s face.

“Quit it!” Didi’s voice was a flat hiss. Her hands flickered across the controls. “This is the last time you little crappers get into my control room! Jirlib, get over there! Shut your sisters down or drag them out, but no more crapping nonsense.”

“Yes, yes! I’m so sorry.” Jirlib really did sound sorry. He rushed over and plucked Gokna from the glass wall. A second later Brent followed him, grabbing Victory.

Jirlib didn’t seem angry, just upset. He held Gokna very close to his head. “You must be quiet. For once you must be serious.” It occurred to Viki that maybe he was just upset because Didi was so angry with him. But it really didn’t matter. All the laughter had leaked out of Gokna. She touched an eating hand to her brother’s maw, and said softly, “Yes. I’ll be good for the rest of the show. I promise.”

Behind them, Viki could see Didi talking—probably to the phone in Digby’s ear. Viki couldn’t hear the words, but the guy was nodding agreement. He had eased Pedure back to her seat, and now segued into his introduction of Daddy. All the action on this side of the glass had accounted for virtually nothing out there. Someday she and Gokna were going to get themselves into real trouble, but it looked like that adventure was still somewhere in the future.

Xopi sat down amid general confusion. Usually the zipheads tried to keep these shows in approximate real time. Silipan claimed that was only partly his specification—the ziphead translators really liked to stay in synch with the word stream. In some sense, they really did like to act. Today they just weren’t very successful at it.

Finally, Broute got himself together and gave a relatively smooth introduction to Sherkaner Underhill.

Sherkaner Underhill. Trixia Bonsol translated him. Who else could it have been? Trixia had been the first to crack the spoken language of the Spiders. Jau had told Ezr that in the early days of the live show, she had handled all the parts, children’s voices, old people, phone-in questions. After other zipheads acquired fluency and there was a consensus of style, still Trixia had taken the hard parts.

Sherkaner Underhill: That might be the first Spider they ever had a name for. Underhill showed up in an incredible range of radio broadcasts. At first, it seemed that he had invented two-thirds of the industrial revolution. That misconception had faded: “Underhill” was a common name, and where this “Sherkaner Underhill” was referenced, it was always one of his students who actually did the work. So the guy must be a bureaucrat, the founder of the Princeton Institute, where most of his students seemed to be. But ever since the Spiders invented microwave relays, the snoopersats had been sucking on an increasing stream of easily decrypted national secrets. The “Sherkaner Underhill” ID showed up on almost twenty percent of all the high-security traffic that flowed across the Goknan Accord. Clearly, they were dealing with some kind of institutional name. Clearly… until they learned that “Sherkaner Underhill” had children, and they were on this radio show. Even though they hadn’t figured it all out, there was some real political significance to “The Children’s Hour.” No doubt, Tomas Nau was watching this show over on Hammerfest.I wonder if Qiwiis with him.

Trixia spoke: “Thank you, Master Digby. I am very happy to be here this afternoon. It’s time there be an open discussion of these issues. In fact, I hope that young people—both in-phase and out-of-phase—are listening. I know my children are.”

The look Trixia sent Xopi’s way was relaxed and confident. Yet there was a faint tremor in her voice. Ezr stared at her face. How old was Trixia now? The full ziphead Watch schedules were classified—probably because so many were being run at one hundred percent. It should take a lifetime to learn all Trixia had learned. At least after the early years, every Watch he stood, there she was. She looked ten years older than the Trixia before Focus. And when she played Underhill, she seemed even older.

Trixia was still talking: “But I want to correct one thing that Lady Pedure said. There was no secret plot to keep the age of these children a secret. My two oldest—they’re fourteen, now—have been on the show for some time. It’s quite natural that they should participate, and from the letters they got, I know that they were very popular with both current-generation children and their parents.”

Xopi looked down the table at Trixia: “And of course, that is simply because they kept quiet their true age. On the radio, you can’t tell such small a difference. On the radio, some… obscenities… go unnoticed.”

Trixia laughed. “Indeed they do. But I want our listeners to think on this. Most of them are fond of Jirlib and Brent and Gokna and Viki. Meeting my children ‘blind’ on the radio showed our listeners a truth they might have missed otherwise: the oophase are as decent as anyone else. But again, I hid nothing. Eventually… well, eventually the facts of the matter were so obvious that no one could ignore them.”

“So blatant, you mean. Your second clutch of oophases is scarce seven years old.That obscenity even radio can not disguise. And when we met here in the studio, I see you have twonewborns suckling in your fur. Tell me, sir, is there any limit to how much evil you will do?”

“Lady Pedure, what evil, what harm? Our audience has listened to one or another of my children for more than two years. They know Jirlib and Brent and Viki and Gokna as real and likable people. You see Little Hrunk and Rhapsa looking at you from my shoulders—” Trixia paused as if to give the other time for a look. “I know it pains you to see babies so far from the Waning Years. But in a year or two they will be old enough to talk, and I fully intend to have ‘The Children’s Hour’ include all the ages of my children. From program to program, our audience will see that these little cobblies are just as worthy as ones born at the end of the Waning Years.”

“Absurdity! Your scheme only wins if you sneak up on decent people a small step at a time, getting them to accept this waiver of morality and then that, until…”

“Until what?” Trixia asked, smiling benignly.

“Until—until—” Behind her semiclear huds, Ezr could see that Xopi was staring wildly. “Until decent people will kiss upon those ill-timed maggots you carry on your back!” She was out of her chair, waving her arms in Trixia’s direction.

Trixia was still smiling. “In a word, my dear Pedure, ‘Yes.’ Even you see that there can be acceptance. But out-of-phase children are not maggots. They do not need a First Darkness to give them their souls. They are creatures who can become lovable Spiders in their own right. As the years pass, ‘The Children’s Hour’ will make this obvious to everyone, perhaps even to you.”

Xopi sat down. She looked very much like a debater who has been bested and is casting about for some different line of attack. “I see appeal to decency has no strength with you, Master Underhill. And there may be weak people in the audience who move to perversion by your gradual approach. Everyone has immoral inclinations, in that we agree. But we also have quite moral ones, innate. Tradition guides us between the two… but I can see that tradition has small weight with such as you. You are a scientist, not so?”

“Hm, yes.”

“And one of the four Darkstriders?”

“…Yes.”

“Our audience may not realize so distinguished a person lurks behind ‘The Children’s Hour.’ You are one of four who has actually seen the Deepest Dark. Nothing holds mystery for you.” Trixia started to respond, but Xopi as Pedure rolled right over her words. “I daresay this explains much of your flaw. You are blind about the striving of previous generations, the slow learning of what is deadly and what is safe in Spiderly affairs. There are reasons for moral law, sir! Without moral law, diligent hoarders will be robbed by the indolent at the end of the Waning Years. Without moral law, innocents in their deepnesses will be massacred by the first-getting-awake. We all want many things, but some of those are bottomly destructive of all desires.”

“This last is true, Lady Pedure. What is your point?”

“The point is that there arereasons for rules, in especial for the rules against oophaseness. As a Darkstrider you make trivial of things, but even you must know the Dark is the great cleanser. I’ve listened to your children. Today before air time, I watched them in the engineer’s control room. There is a scandal within your secret, but not surprising. At least one of your children—the one named Brent?—is a cretin, is he not?”

Xopi stopped talking, but Trixia didn’t respond. Her gaze was steady; she wasn’t scrambling to keep up with the intermediate-layer data reps. And suddenly, Ezr felt the strangest change in perspective, like a change in imagined-down, but enormously more intense. It wasn’t caused by the translators’ words or even the emotion in their words. It was the… silence. For the first time, Ezr knew a Spider as a person, a person who could be hurt.

The silence stretched on for several more seconds. “Ha,” said Silipan. “That’s pretty good confirmation on a lot of guesses. The Spiders breed in large clutches, and then Mother Nature kills off the weak ones during the Dark. Slick.”

Liao grimaced. “Yeah, I guess.” Her hand reached to her husband’s shoulder.

Zinmin Broute abruptly broke the silence. “Master Underhill, are you going to reply to the Honored Pedure’s question?”

“Yes.” The quaver in Trixia’s voice was more pronounced than before. “Brent is no cretin. He’s not verbal and he learns differently than other children.” Her voice picked up enthusiasm, and there was a shadow of a smile. “Intelligence is such a remarkable thing. In Brent I see—”

Xopi cut her off. “—In BrentI see the classical birth wreck of the oophase child. My friends, I know the strength of the Church suffers now in this generation. There is so much change, and the old ways are so much thought tyrannical. In previous times, a child such as Brent could only happen in backwoods townships, where barbarism and perversion have always been. In previous times, such was easy to explain: ‘The parents evaded the Dark, like not even animals would do. They brought poor Brent into the world to live some years of crippled life, and rightly should they be loathed for their cruelty.’ But in our times, it is an intellectual such as Underhill”—a nod in the direction of Trixia—“who makes this sin. He makes you laugh upon tradition, and I must fight him with his own reasons. Look upon this child, Master Underhill. How many more have you borne like him?”

Trixia: “All my cobblies—”

“Ah, yes. No doubt there have been other failures. You have six that we know of. How many more are there? Do you kill the clear failures? If the world follows your perversion, civilization will die before even the next Dark comes, smothered in hordes of ill-conceived and crippled cobblies.” Pedure went on in this vein at some length. In fact, her complaints were very concrete: birth deformities, overpopulation, forced killings, riots in deepnesses at the beginning of the Dark—all would follow if there were a popular move toward out-of-phase births. Xopi rattled on until she was visibly out of breath.

Broute turned to Trixia as Underhill: “And your reply?”

Trixia: “Ah, it is nice to be able to reply.” Trixia was smiling again, her tone almost as light as at the beginning of the program. If Underhill had been unhinged by the attack on his son, maybe Pedure’s long speech had given him time to recover. “First, all my children are living. There are only six. That should not be surprising. It’s hard to conceive children out-of-phase. I’m sure everyone knows this. It is also very hard to nurture the out-of-phase baby welts long enough for them to grow eyes. Nature does indeed prefer that cobblies be created right before the Dark.”

Xopi leaned forward, speaking loudly. “Take careful note, friends! Underhill just now admits that he commits crime against nature!”

“Not at all. Evolution has caused us to survive and thrive within Nature. But times change—”

Xopi sounded sarcastic: “So times change? Science made you a Darkstrider, and now you are greater than Nature?”

Trixia laughed. “Oh, I’m still very much a part of Nature. But even before technology—did you know that ten million years ago, the length of the sun’s cycle was less than one year?”

“Fantasy. How could creatures live—”

“How indeed?” Trixia was smiling more broadly, and her tone was one of triumph. “But the record of fossil edgings is very clear. Ten million years ago, the cycle was much shorter and the variation in brightness much less intense. There was no need for deepnesses and hibernation. As the cycle of light and dark became longer and more extreme, all surviving creatures adapted. I imagine it was a harsh process. Many great changes were necessary. And now—”

Xopi made a cutting gesture. Did she make those up or were they somehow implied by the Spider broadcast? “If not fantasy, it’s still not proved. Sir, I will not argue evolution with you. There are decent people who believe it, but it is speculation—no basis for death-and-life decisions.”

“Ha!Point for Daddy!” From their perches atop Brent and Jirlib, the two girls exchanged quiet editorial comments. Where Didire couldn’t see, they were also making maw-gestures at the Honored Pedure. After that first Ten, there had been no obvious reaction, but it felt good to show the cobber how they felt about her.

“Don’t worry, Brent. Daddy’s going to get this Pedure.”

Brent had been even more quiet than usual. “I knew this was going to happen. Things were hard enough. Now Dad has to explain about me, too.”

In fact, Daddy had almost lost it when Pedure called Brent a cretin. Viki had never seen him look quite so lost. But he was taking back lost ground now. Viki had thought Pedure would be a know-nothing, but she seemed familiar with some of what Daddy was throwing at her. It didn’t matter. Honored Pedure wasn’t that knowledgeable; besides, Daddy wasright.

And he was on a real pounce now: “Strange that tradition should not show more interest in the earliest past, Lady Pedure. But no matter. The changes that science is making in this current generation will be so great that I might better use them to illustrate. Nature enforced certain strategies—and the cycle of generations is one of them, I agree. Without that enforcement, we likely would not exist. But think of the waste, my lady. All our children are in one stage of life in each year. Once past that stage, the tools of their schooling must lie idle until the next generation. There is no need for such waste anymore. With science—”

Honored Pedure gave a whistling laugh, full of sarcasm and surprise. “So you admit it there! You plot that oophase be a way of life, not your isolated sin.”

“Of course!” Daddy bounced up. “I want people to know that we live in an era that is different. I want people to be free to have children in every season of the sun.”

“Yes. You intend to invade the rest of us. Tell me, Underhill, do you already have secret schools for the oophase? Are there hundreds or thousands like your six, just waiting for our acceptance?”

“Uh, no. So far we have not found playmates for my children.”

Over the years, all of them had wanted playmates. Mother had searched for them, so far without success. Gokna and Viki had concluded that other oophases must be very well hidden… or very rare. Sometimes, Viki wondered if maybe they really were damned; it was so hard to find any others.

Honored Pedure leaned back on her perch, smiling in an almost friendly way. “That last is comfort to me, Master Underhill. Even in our times, most folk are decent, and your perversions are rare. Nevertheless, ‘The Children’s Hour’ continues to be popular, even though the in-phase are now more than twenty years old. Your show is a lure that didn’t exist beforetimes. And our view exchange is therefore terribly important.”

“Yes, indeed. I think so, too.”

Honored Pedure cocked her head. What rotten luck. The cobber realized that Daddy meant it. If she got Daddy to speculating… things could be very sticky. Pedure’s next question was spoken in a casual tone of honest curiosity. “It seems to me, Master Underhill, that you understand moral law. Do you consider it, maybe, to be something like the law of creative art—to be broken by the greatest thinkers, such as yourself?”

“Greatest thinkers, fooey.” But the question had clearly caught Daddy’s imagination, drawing him away from persuasive rhetoric. “You know, Pedure, I never looked at moral rules like that before. What an interesting idea! You suggest that they could be ignored by those who have some innate—what? Talent for goodness? Surely not…. Though I confess to being an illiterate when it comes to moral argument. I like to play and I like to think. The Darkstriding was a great lark, as much as it was important to the war effort. Science will create wonderful change in the near future of Spiderkind. I’m having enormous fun with these things, and I want the public—including those whoare experts at moral thought—to understand the consequences of the change.”

Honored Pedure said, “Indeed.” The sarcasm was there only if you were listening as suspiciously as Little Victory was. “And you intend somehow for science to replace the Dark as the great cleanser and the great mystery?”

Daddy made dismissing gestures with his eating hands. He seemed to have forgotten that he was on the radio. “Science will make the Dark of the Sun as innocuous and knowable as the night that comes at the end of every day.”

In the control room, Didi gave a little yip of surprise. It was the first time Viki had ever heard the engineer react to the broadcasts she was supervising. Out on the soundstage, Rappaport Digby sat up as straight as if someone had stuck a spear up his rear. Daddy didn’t seem to notice, and Honored Pedure’s response was as casual as if they were discussing the possibility of rain: “We’ll live and work right through the Dark as if it was just one long night?”

“Yes! What do you think all the talk of nuclear power means?”

“So then we all will be Darkstriders, and there will be no Dark, no mystery, no Deepness for the mind of Spiderkind to rest within. Science will take all.”

“Piffle. On this one small world, there will be no more real darkness. But there will always be the Dark. Go out tonight, Lady Pedure. Look up. We are surrounded by the Dark and always will be. And just as our Dark ends with the passage of time in a New Sun, so the greater Dark ends at the shores of a million million stars. Think! If our sun’s cycle was once less than a year, then even earlier our sun might have been middling bright all the time. I have students who are sure most of the stars are just like our sun, only much much younger, and many with worlds like ours. You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that Spiderkind can depend on? Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.” And Daddy was off on his space-travel thing. Even graduate students glazed over when Daddy started on this; only a hard core of crazies specialized in astronomy. It was all so upside down and inside out. For most people, the idea that lights as steady as stars could be like the sun was a leap of faith greater than most religions asked for.

Digby and Honored Pedure watched open-mawed as Daddy built the theory up in more and more elaboration. Digby had always liked the science part of the show, and this had him all but hypnotized. Pedure on the other hand… her shock faded quickly. Either she had heard this before, or it was tending away from the path she wanted to follow.

The clock on the control-room wall was ticking down toward the orgy of commercial messages that always ended the show. It looked like Daddy was going to get the last word… except that Viki was sure Honored Pedure was watching that clock more intensely than anything in the studio, waiting for some precisely chosen strategic instant.

And then the cleric grabbed her mike close, and spoke loudly enough to break into Sherkaner’s flow of thought. “So interesting, but colonizing the space between the stars is surely beyond the time of this current generation.”

Daddy waved dismissively. “Perhaps yes, but—”

Honored Pedure continued, her voice academic and interested, “So the great change during our time is simply the conquest of the next coming Dark, that which ends this cycle of the sun?”

“Correct. We—all who hear this radio broadcast—will have no need of deepnesses. That is the promise of nuclear power. All the great cities will have sufficient power to stay warm for more than two centuries—all the way through the upcoming Dark. So—”

“I see, and so very large building projects must happen to enclose the cities?”

“Yes, and farms. And we’ll need to provide—”

“And this then is also the reason you want an added generation of adults. This is why you push oophase births.”

“Oh, not directly. It is simply a feature of the new situ—”

“So the Goknan Accord will enter the coming Dark in fact with hundreds of millions of Darkstriders. What of the rest of the world?”

Daddy seemed to realize that he was headed for trouble. “Um, but other technologically advanced countries may do the same. The poorer countries will have their conventional deepnesses, and their awakening will come later.”

Now Pedure’s voice had steel in it, a trap that was finally sprung: “ ‘Their awakening will come later.’ During the Great War, four Darkstriders brought down the most powerful nation of the world. In the next Dark, you will be Darkstriders by the millions. This seems not different from a preparation for the greatest deepness massacres in history.”

“No, it’s not like that at all. We wouldn’t—”

“I’m sorry, lady and sir, our time has run out.”

“But—”

Digby rumbled on over Daddy’s objections. “I’d like to thank you both for being with us today and—” blah blah blah.

On the soundstage, Pedure stood up the moment Digby finished his spiel. The microphones were off now and Viki couldn’t hear the words. The cleric was evidently exchanging pleasantries with the announcer. On the other side of the stage, Daddy looked very nonplussed. As Honored Pedure swept past him, Daddy stood and followed her offstage, talking animatedly. Pedure’s only expression was a haughty little smile.

Behind Viki, Didi Ultmot was pushing levers, tuning the most important part of the broadcast, the commercials. Finally, she turned away from the controls. There was something a little dazed about her aspect. “…You know, your dad has some really… weird… ideas.”

There was a sequence of chords that might have been music, and the words, “Sharpened hands are happy hands. Brim the tinfall with mirthly bands—”

Spider commercials were sometimes the high point of Princeton Radio programs. Molt refresh, eye polish, leggings—many of the products made some sense, even if the selling points did not. Other products were just nonsense words, especially if it was a previously unknown product, and second-string translators.

Today, it was the second-stringers. Reung, Broute, and Trixia sat fidgeting, cut off from the signal stream. Their handlers were already moving in to clear them from the stage. Today the crowd in Benny’s parlor pretty much ignored the commercials, too:

“Not as much fun as when the kids are on, but—”

“Did you get the angle on spaceflight? I wonder what this does to the Schedule? If—”

Ezr wasn’t paying attention. His gaze stayed on the wall, and all the chitchat was just distant buzzing. Trixia looked worse than usual. The flicker of her gaze seemed desperate to Ezr. He often thought that, and a dozen times Anne Reynolt had claimed the behavior was nothing but eagerness to get back to work.

“Ezr?” A hand brushed gently against his sleeve. It was Qiwi. Sometime during the program she had slipped into the parlor. She had done this before, sitting silently, watching the show. Now she had the gall to act like a friend. “Ezr, I—”

“Save it.” Ezr turned away from her.

And so he was looking directly at Trixia when it happened: The handlers had moved Broute out of the room. As they led Xopi Reung past her, Trixia shrieked and lunged from her chair, her fist smashing into the younger woman’s face. Xopi twisted away, jerking out of her handler’s grip. She stared dazedly at the blood streaming from her nose, then wiped her face with her hand. The other tech grabbed the screaming Trixia before she could do more damage. Somehow Trixia’s words made it onto the general audio channel: “Pedure bad! Die! Die!”

“Oh, boy.” Next to Ezr, Trud Silipan bounced off his seat and pushed his way toward the entrance to Benny’s parlor. “Reynolt is going to have a fit about this. I gotta get back to Hammerfest.”

“I’m coming, too.” Ezr brushed past Qiwi and dived for the door. Benny’s parlor was silent for a shocked moment, then everyone was talking—

—but by that time, Ezr was nearly out of earshot, and chasing Silipan. They moved quickly to the main corridor, heading for the taxi tubes. At the locks, Silipan tapped something on the scheduler, then turned. “What do you two want?”

Ezr looked over his shoulder, saw that Pham Trinli had followed them out of Benny’s. Ezr said, “I have to come, Trud. I have to see Trixia.”

Trinli sounded worried too. “Is this going to screw our deal, Silipan? We need to make sure that—”

“Oh, pus. Yeah, we gotta think how this may affect things. Okay. Come along.” He glanced at Ezr. “But you. There’s nothing you can do to help.”

“I’m coming, Trud.” Ezr found himself less than ten centimeters from the other, with his fists raised.

“Okay, okay! Just stay out of the way.” A moment later, the taxi lock blinked green and they were aboard and accelerating out from the temp. The rockpile was a sunlit jumble just to one side of Arachna’s blue disk. “Pest, this would happen when we were on the far side. Taxi!”

“Sir?”

“Best time to Hammerfest.” Normally, they had to baby the taxi hardware—but apparently the automation recognized Trud’s voice and tone.

“Yessir.” The taxi pushed off at nearly a tenth of a gee. Silipan and the others grabbed for restraints, and tied down. Ahead of them the rockpile grew and grew. “This really sucks, you know that? Reynolt is going to say I was absent from my post.”

“Well, weren’t you?” Trinli had settled down right beside Silipan.

“Of course, but it shouldn’t matter. Hell, one handler should have been enough for the whole pus-be-damned translator crew. But now,I’m going to be the one who looks bad.”

“But is Trixia all right?”

“Why did Bonsol blow up like that?” said Trinli.

“It beats me. You know they bicker and fight, especially some of the ones in the same specialty. But this came from nowhere.” Silipan abruptly stopped talking. For a long moment he stared into his huds. Then, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. I bet there was still some audio feed from the ground. You know, a live mike, a failure of their show management. Maybe Underhill took a swipe at the other Spider. That might make Bonsol’s action ‘valid translation.’ …Damn!”

Now the guy was really worried, grasping at random explanations. Trinli seemed too dense to notice. He grinned and slapped Silipan lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. You know Qiwi Lisolet is in on the deal. That means that Podmaster Nau wants the zips to be more widely used, too. We’ll just say you were aboard the temp to help me with the details.”

The taxi turned end for end, braking for its landing. The rockpile and Arachna tumbled across the sky.

TWENTY-FIVE

They didn’t see the Honored Pedure on the way out of the radio station. Daddy was a little subdued, but he smiled and laughed when the cobblies told him how much they liked his performance. He didn’t even scold Gokna for Giving Ten. Brent got to sit up front with Daddy on the way back to Hill House.

Gokna and Victory didn’t talk much in the car. They both knew that everybody was fooling everybody.

When they got home, it was still two hours until dinner. The kitchen staff claimed that General Smith had returned from Lands Command and that she would be at dinner. Gokna and Viki exchanged looks.I wonderwhat Mother will say to Daddy. The juiciest parts wouldn’t be at dinner.Hmm. So what to do with the rest of the afternoon? The sisters split up, separately recon’d the spiraled halls of Hill House. There were rooms—lots of rooms—that were always locked. Some of them were ones that they had never even been able to steal keys for. The General had her own offices here, even if the most important stuff was down at Lands Command.

Viki poked into Daddy’s ground-floor den and the tech-level cafeteria, but only briefly. She’d bet Gokna that Daddy would not be hiding, but now she realized that today “not hiding” did not preclude “difficult to find.” She roamed through the labs, found the typical signs of his passage, graduate students in various states of puzzlement and sudden, surprised enlightenment. (“Underhill Dazzle” was what the students called it: If you came away puzzled, chances were that Daddy had said something worthwhile. If you were instantly enlightened, it probably meant Daddy had fooled both himself and you with a facile misinsight.)

The new signals lab was near the top of the house, under a roof full of experimental antennas. She caught Jaybert Landers coming down the steps from there. The cobber wasn’t showing any symptoms of Underhill Dazzle. Too bad.

“Hello, Jaybert. Have you seen my—”

“Yeah, they’re both up in the lab.” He jerked a hand over his shoulder.

Aha! But Viki didn’t immediately sidle past him. If the General was already here, maybe she should get some far intelligence. “So what’s happening, Jaybert?”

Of course, Jaybert took the question to be about his work. “Damnedest thing. I put my new antenna on the Lands Command link just this morning. At first the alignment was fine, but then I started getting these fifteen-second patches where it looks like there are two stations on the line-of-sight. I wanted to ask your father—” Viki followed him a few steps down the stairs, making agreeable sounds to the other’s unintelligible talk about amplifier stages and transient alignment failures. No doubt Jaybert had been very pleased to get Daddy’s quick attention, and no doubt Daddy had been delighted for an excuse to hole up in the signals lab. And then Mother showed up….

Viki left Jaybert down by his office-cubby, and climbed back up the stairs, this time circling around to the lab’s utility entrance. There was a column of light at the end of the corridor. Ha! The door was partway open. She could hear the General’s voice. Viki slipped down the hallway to the door.

“—just don’t understand, Sherkaner. You are a brilliant person. How can you behave like such an idiot?”

Victory Junior hesitated, almost backed out of the darkened hall. She had never heard Mom sound quite so angry. It… hurt. On the other hand, Gokna would give anything to hear Viki’s report-of-action. Viki moved silently forward, turned her head sideways to peek through the narrow gap. The lab was pretty much as she remembered it, full of oscilloscopes and high-speed recorders. The covers were off some of Jaybert’s gear, but apparently Mom had arrived before the two got into any serious electronic dismemberment. Mother was standing in front of Daddy, blocking his best eyes from seeing Viki.And I bet I’m near the center of Mom’s blind spot.

“…Was I really that bad?” Daddy was saying.

“Yes!”

Sherkaner Underhill seemed to wilt under the General’s glare. “I don’t know. The cobber got me off guard. The comment about little Brent. I knew that was coming. You and I had talked about that. Even Brent and I talked about it. And even so, it knocked my legs out. I got confused.”

Mom jerked her hand, dismissing the comment. “That was no problem, Sherk. You gave a good response. Your hurt came across in a caring, paternal way. And yet a few minutes later she sucked you in—”

“Except for the astronomy, I only said things we had planned for the show over the next year.”

“But you said them all at once!”

“…I know. Pedure started talking like a bright, curious person. Like Hrunk or people here at Hill House. She raised some interesting questions and I got carried away. And you know? Even now… this Pedure is smart and flexible. Given time, I think I could have won her over.”

The General’s laugh was sharp and unhappy. “God Below, you are a fool! Sherk, I…” Mom reached out to touch Daddy. “I’m sorry. Funny, I don’t chew out my own staffers the way I do you.”

Daddy made a kindly sound, like when he was talking to Rhapsa or Little Hrunk. “You know the reason for that, dear. You love me as much as yourself. And I know how much you chew on yourself.”

“Inside. Only silently, and inside.” They were quiet for a moment, and Little Victory wished that she had lost her recon game with Gokna. But when Mother spoke again, her voice was more normal. “We both screwed up on this.” She keyed open her travel case and picked out some papers. “Over the next year, ‘The Children’s Hour’ was to introduce the virtue and the possibility of life in the Dark, on schedule with the first construction contracts. Someday, we knew there would be military consequences, but we didn’t expect anything at this stage.”

“Military consequences now?”

“Deadly maneuvering, anyway. You know this Pedure cobber is from Tiefstadt.”

“Sure. Her accent is unmistakable.”

“Her cover is good, partly because it’s mainly true. Honored Pedure is Cleric Three in the Church of the Dark. But she’s also midlevel intelligence with Action of God.”

“The Kindred.”

“Indeed. We’ve had friendly relations with the Tiefers since the war, but the Kindred are beginning to change that. They already have several minor states in their effective control. They’re a legitimate sect of the Church, but—”

Far down the corridor behind Little Victory, someone turned on a hall light. Mom raised a hand and stood very still.Oops. Maybe she had noticed a faint silhouette, familiar grooves and armored fluting. Without turning, Smith extended a long arm in the direction of the eavesdropper. “Junior! Shut the door and get yourself back to your room.”

Little Victory’s voice was small and abashed. “Yes, Mother.”

As she slid the utility door closed, she heard one last comment: “Damn. I spend fifty million a year on signal security, and my own daughter is running intercepts on me—”

Just now, the clinic under Hammerfest was a crowded place. On Pham’s previous visits, there had been Trud, sometimes another technician, and one or two “patients.” Today—well, a hand grenade would have caused more turmoil among the Focused, but not by much. Both the MRI units were occupied. One of the handlers was prepping Xopi Reung for MRI; the woman moaned, thrashing against his efforts. Over in a corner, Dietr Li—the physicist?—was strapped down, mumbling to himself.

Reynolt had one foot hooked over a ceiling stay, so that she hung down close to the MRI without getting in the way of the techs. She didn’t look around as they came in. “Okay, induction complete. Keep the arms restrained.” The tech slid his patient out into the middle of the room. It was Trixia Bonsol; she looked around, obviously not recognizing anyone, and then her face collapsed into hopeless sobbing.

“You’ve deFocused her!” Vinh shouted, pushing past Trud and Trinli. Pham anchored and grabbed, all in one motion, and Vinh’s forward motion reversed, bouncing him lightly against the wall.

Reynolt looked in Vinh’s direction. “Be silent or get out,” she said. She jerked a hand at Bil Phuong. “Insert Dr. Reung. I want—” The rest was jargon. A normal bureaucrat would certainly have kicked them out. Anne Reynolt really didn’t care, as long as they didn’t get in her way.

Silipan drifted back to Pham and Vinh. He looked subdued and grim. “Yeah. Shut up, Vinh.” He glanced at the MRI’s display. “Bonsol’s still Focused. We’ve just detuned her linguistics ability. It’ll make her easier to… treat.” He glanced at Bonsol uncertainly. The woman had bent in on herself as far as the restraints would permit. Her weeping continued, hopeless and inconsolable.

Vinh struggled briefly in Pham’s grasp, and then he was still except for a tremor that only Pham could feel. For a second it looked like he might start bawling. Then the boy twisted, turned his face away from Bonsol, and screwed his eyes shut.

Tomas Nau’s voice came loud in the room. “Anne? I’ve lost three analysis threads since this outage began. Do you know—”

Reynolt’s tone was almost the same she had used with Vinh: “Give me a Ksec. I have at least five cases of runaway rot.”

“Lordy… keep me posted, Anne.”

Reynolt was already talking to someone else. “Hom! What’s the story on Dr. Li?”

“He’s rational, ma’am; I’ve been listening to him. Something happened during the radio show, and—”

Reynolt sailed across the room to Dieter Li, somehow missing techs, zipheads, and equipment. “That’s bizarre. There shouldn’t have been live crosstalk between physics and the radio show.”

The tech tapped a card attached to Li’s blouse. “His log says he heard the translation.”

Pham noticed Silipan swallow hard. Could this be one of his screwups? Damn. If the man was disgraced, Pham would lose his pipeline into the Focus operation.

But Reynolt still hadn’t noticed her AWOL technician. She leaned close to Dietr Li, listened for a moment to his mumbling. “You’re right. He’s stuck on what the Spider said about OnOff. I doubt he’s suffering from real runaway. Just keep watching him; let me know if he starts looping.”

More voices from the walls, and these sounded Focused: “…Attic lab twenty percent inchoate… probable cause: cross-specialty reactions to audio stream ID2738 ‘Children’s Hour’… Instabilities are undamped…”

“I hear you, Attic. Prep for fast shutdown.” Reynolt returned to Trixia Bonsol. She stared at the weeping woman, her look an eerie combination of intense interest and total detachment. Abruptly she turned, her gaze skewering Trud Silipan. “You! Get over here.”

Trud bounced across the room to his boss’s side. “Yes, ma’am! Yes, ma’am!” For once there was no hidden impudence. Vengeance might be unthinkable to Reynolt, but her judgments were ones that Nau and Brughel would enforce. “I was checking out the effectiveness of the translations, ma’am, how well laypersons”—namely the patrons of Benny’s booze parlor—“would understand her.”

The excuses were lost on Reynolt. “Get an offline team. I want Dr. Bonsol’s log checked out.” She leaned closer to Trixia, her gaze probing. The translator’s weeping had stopped. Her body was curled in a quivering tetany. “I’m not sure if we can save this one.”

Ezr Vinh twisted in Pham’s grip, and for a moment it seemed he might start shouting again. Then he gave Pham a strange look and remained silent. Pham loosened his grip and gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder.

The two of them stayed silent, watching. “Patients” came and went. Several more were detuned. Xopi Reung came out of the MRI much like Trixia Bonsol. Over the last few Watches, Pham had had plenty of opportunity to watch Silipan work, and pump him about procedures. He’d even got a look at a beginning textbook on Focus. This was the first time he’d had a solid look at how Reynolt and the other technicians worked.

But something really deadly had happened here. Mindrot runaway. In attacking the problem, Reynolt came as close to emotion as Pham had ever seen her. Some parts of the mystery were solved right away. Trud’s query right at the beginning of the debate had triggered a search across many specialities. That was the reason so many zipheads had been listening to the debate. Their analysis had proceeded very normally for several hundred seconds, but then as the results were posted, there was a surge in communication between the translators. Normally, that was consultative, tuning the words that they spoke aloud. This time, it was deadly nonsense. First Trixia and then most of the other translators began to drift, their brain chemistry indicating an uncontrolled excursion of the rot. Real damage had been done even before Trixia attacked Xopi Reung, but that had marked the beginning of the massive runaway. Whatever was being communicated within the ziphead net provoked a cascade of similar flareups. Before the emergency was fully appreciated, about twenty percent of all the zipheads were affected, the virus in their brains producing out of bounds, flooding them with psychoactives and frankly toxic chemicals.

The nav zipheads were not affected. Brughel’s snoops were moderately affected. Pham watched everything Reynolt did, trying to absorb every detail, every clue.If I can make something like this happen to the L1 supportnetwork, if Brughel’s people could be disabled…

Anne Reynolt seemed to be everywhere. Every technician deferred to her. It was she who saved most of Ritser’s zips; she who managed the reboot of limited Attic operations. And it came to Pham that without Anne Reynolt, there might not have been any recovery. Back in the Emergents’ home solar system, ziphead crashes might be occasional inconveniences. There were universities to generate replacements, hundreds of clinics for Focusing newly created specialists. Here, twenty light-years from the Emergent civilization, it was a different story. Here, little failures could grow unbounded… and without some supernally competent manager, without Anne Reynolt, Tomas Nau’s operation could collapse.

Xopi Reung flat-lined shortly after they brought her out of the MRI. Reynolt broke off from managing the Attic reboot, spent frantic moments with the translator. Here, she had no success. A hundred seconds later, the runaway infection had poisoned Reung’s brain stem… and the rest didn’t matter. Reynolt looked at the still body for a second more, frowning. Then she waved for the techs to float the body out.

Pham watched as Trixia Bonsol was moved out of the clinic. She was still alive; Reynolt herself was at the front of Bonsol’s carrier.

Trud Silipan followed her toward the door. Suddenly he seemed to remember the two visitors. He turned and made a come-along gesture. “Okay, Trinli. End of show.”

Silipan’s face was grim and pale. The exact cause of the runaway was still unknown; it was some obscure interaction between the zipheads. Trud’s use of the ziphead net—his query at the beginning of the debate—should have been an innocuous use of the resources. But Trud was at the pointy end of some very bad luck. Even if his query hadn’t triggered the debacle, it was connected to it. In a Qeng Ho operation, Silipan’s query would have just been another clue. Unfortunately, the Emergents had some very post hoc methods for defining sin.

“Are you going to be okay, Trud?”

Silipan gave a frightened little shrug and chivied them out of the clinic. “Get on back to the temp—and don’t let Vinh come after his ziphead.” Then he turned and followed Reynolt.

Pham and Vinh hiked up from the depths of Hammerfest, alone except for the certain presence of Brughel’s snoops. The Vinh boy was quiet. In a way, today had been the biggest kick in the face he had suffered in years, maybe since Jimmy Diem’s death. For an n-times-removed descendant, Ezr Vinh had a face that was entirely too familiar. He reminded Pham of Ratko Vinh when Ratko was young; he had a lot of Sura’s face. That was not a pleasant thought.Maybe my subconcious is trying to tell me something…. Yes. Not just in the clinic, but all this Watch. Every so often the kid would look at him… and the look was more of calculation than contempt. Pham thought back, trying to remember just how his Trinli character had behaved. Certainly it was a risk to be so interested in Focus. But he had Trud’s scams as a cover for that. No, even while they were standing in the clinic and Pham’s mind had been totally concentrated on Reynolt and the Bonsol mystery—even then he was sure he hadn’t looked anything but mildly dazed, an old charlatan worried that this debacle would mess up the deals he and Trud had planned. Yet somehow this Vinh had seen through him. How? And what to do about it?

They came out of the main vertical corridor, and started down the ramp to the taxi locks. The Focused murals were everywhere, ceilings, walls, floors. In places, the diamond walls had been planed thin. Blue light—the light of full Arachna—came softly through the crystal, darker or lighter depending on the depth of the carving. Because Arachna was always in full phase from L1 and the rockpile was kept in a fixed phase relative to the sun, the light had been steady for years. There might have been a time when Pham Nuwen would have fallen in love with that art, but now he knew how it had been made. Watch after Watch, he and Trud Silipan would come down this ramp and see workers, carving. Nau and Brughel had pissed away the lifetimes of nonacademic zipheads to make this art. Pham guessed that at least two had died of old age. The survivors were gone now, too, perhaps finishing the carvings on lesser corridors.After I take over, thingswill be different. Focus was such a terrible thing. It must never be used except for the most critical needs.

They passed a side corridor paneled in tank-grown wood. The grain swirled smoothly, following the curve of the corridor that led downward to Tomas Nau’s private quarters.

And there was Qiwi Lin Lisolet. Maybe she had heard them coming. More likely she had seen their departure from the clinic. Either way, she had been waiting long enough that she stood with feet on the floor, as if in normal planetary gravity.

“Ezr, please. Can we talk, just for a moment? I never meant these shows to hurt—”

Vinh had been drifting ahead of Pham, silently pulling himself along. His head snapped up when he saw Qiwi. For an instant it seemed he might float on by her. Then she spoke. Vinh pushed hard against the wall, diving fast and directly toward her. The action was as bluntly hostile as swinging a fist at another’s face.

“Here now!” Pham blustered, and forced himself to hang back in seeming impotence. He’d already waylaid the fellow once today, and this time the scene would be quite clear to the snoops. Besides, Pham had watched Qiwi work outside. She was in better condition than anyone at L1, and a natural acrobat. Maybe it would do Vinh some good to learn he couldn’t off-load his anger on her.

But Qiwi didn’t defend, didn’t even flinch. Vinh twisted, delivering a powerful, openhanded slap that sent them spinning apart. “Yes, we’ll talk!” Vinh’s voice was ragged. He bounced after her and he slapped her again. And again Qiwi didn’t defend, didn’t even raise her hands to shield her face.

And Pham Nuwen pushed forward before he’d really thought. Something in the back of his mind was laughing at him for risking years of masquerade just to protect one innocent. But that same something also cheered.

Pham’s dive turned into an apparently uncontrolled spin, one that just accidentally slammed his shoulder into Vinh’s gut and smashed the younger man into the wall. Out of sight of any camera, Pham gave his opponent a piece of elbow. An instant after the impact, the back of Vinh’s head smacked against the wall. If they had still been down in the carved diamond corridors, that might have caused serious injury. As it was, when Vinh came off the wall, his arms were flailing weakly. Little droplets of blood sprouted up from the back of his head.

“Pick on someone your own size, Vinh! Cowardly, scummy piece of vermin. You Great Family Traders are all alike.” Pham’s rage was real—but it was also rage against himself, for risking his cover.

The wits slowly percolated back into Vinh’s eyes. He glanced at Qiwi, four meters down the hallway. The girl looked back, her expression a strange combination of shock and determination. And then Vinh looked at Pham, and the old man felt a chill. Maybe Brughel’s cameras hadn’t caught all the details of the fight, but the kid knew how calculated Pham’s assault had been. For an instant the two stared at each other, and then Vinh shrugged free of his grasp and scooted back down the ramp toward the taxi locks. It was the scuttling retreat of a shamed and beaten man. But Pham had seen the look in his eyes; something would have to be done about Ezr Vinh.

Qiwi started after Vinh, but dragged herself to a stop before she had gone ten meters. She floated in the of the corridors, staring off in the direction Vinh had gone.

Pham came near. He knew he had to get out of here. No doubt several cameras were watching him now, and he was just no good at staying in character around Qiwi. So what to say that would get him safely gone? “Don’t worry, kid. Vinh is just not worth it. He won’t bother you again; I guarantee it.”

After a moment, the girl turned to face him. Lord, she looked so much like her mother; Nau had been running her nearly Watch-on-Watch. There were tears in her eyes. He couldn’t see any cuts or blood, but bruises were beginning to show on her dark skin. “I really didn’t meant to hurt him. God, I don’t know what I’ll do if Trixia d-dies.” Qiwi brushed back her close-cut black hair. Grown-up or not, she looked as lost as during the first days after the Diem “atrocity.” She was so alone she would confide in a windbag like Pham Trinli. “When… when I was little, I admired Ezr Vinh more than anyone in the universe, except my parents.” She glanced at Pham; her smile was tremulous and hurt. “I wanted so much for him to think well of me. And then the Emergents attacked us, and then Jimmy Diem killed my mother and all the others…. We are all in a very small lifeboat. We can’t have any more killing.” She gave her head a sharp little shake. “Did you know that Tomas has not used coldsleep since the Diem massacre? He’s lived every second of all these years. Tomas is so serious, so hardworking. He believes in Focus, but he’s open to new ways of doing things.” She was telling him what she had wanted to tell Ezr. “Benny’s parlor wouldn’t exist without Tomas. None of the trading and bonsai would exist. Little by little we are making the Emergents understand our ways. Someday, Tomas will be able to release my father and Trixia and all the Focused. Someday—”

Pham wanted to reach out and comfort her. Pham Nuwen might be the only living person besides the murderers who knew what had really happened to Jimmy Diem, and who knew what Nau and Brughel were doing with Qiwi Lin Lisolet. He should give her a gruff brush-off and leave, but somehow he couldn’t do that. Instead he hung in place, looking embarrassed and confused.Yes. Someday. Someday, child, you will be avenged.

TWENTY-SIX

Ritser Brughel’s quarters and command post were aboard theInvisibleHand. He often wondered how the Peddlers had come up with such a perfect name, in two words expressing the essence of Security. In any case, theHand was the most nearly undamaged of all the hulls, Qeng Ho or Emergent. The flight-crew quarters were sound. The main drive could probably sustain a one-gee thrust for several days. Since the takeover, theHand ’s comm and ECM had been refurbished to Focused standards. Here on theInvisible Hand , he was something of a god.

Unfortunately, physical isolation was no protection against a mindrot runaway. Runaway was triggered by emotional imbalance in the Focused mind. That meant it could propagate across communications networks, though normally that only happened between closely cooperating zipheads. Back in civilization, runaway was a constant, low-level concern, just another reason for having hot swaps available. Here in the godforsaken nowhere, it was a deadly threat. Ritser had been aware of the runaway almost as quickly as Reynolt—but he couldn’t afford to shut down his zips. As usual, Reynolt gave him second-class service, but he managed. They split the snoops into small groups, and ran each separately from the others. The resulting intelligence was fragmented; their logs would require lots of later analysis. But they had missed nothing big… and eventually they would catch up with all the details.

In the first 20Ksec, Ritser lost three snoops to the runaway. He had Omo flush them and keep the others running. He went down to Hammerfest, had a long meeting with Tomas Nau. It looked like Reynolt was going to lose at least six people, including a big hunk of her translation department. The Senior Podmaster was properly impressed with Brughel’s lower casualties. “Keep your people online, Ritser. Anne thinks the translators chose sides in that damn Spider debate, that the runaway rot was an escalation of a normal ziphead disagreement. Maybe so, but the debate was well removed from center of the translators’ Focus. Once things stabilize, I want you to go over every second of your records, comb it for suspicious events.”

After another 60Ksec, Brughel and Nau agreed that the crisis was past, at least for the Security zips. Podsergeant Omo put the snoops back into consultation with Reynolt’s people, but via a buffered link. He began a detailed scan of the immediate past. The debacle had indeed blown away Ritser’s operation, albeit very briefly. For about one thousand seconds, they had totally lost emission security. Closer investigation showed that nothing had been beamed toward any outside system; their long-term secrecy was intact. Locally, the translators had screamed something past the controllers, but the Spiders had not noticed; not surprising, since the chaotic transmissions would have seemed like transient noise.

In the end, Ritser was forced to conclude that the runway was simply very bad luck. But amid the trivia there were some very interesting tidbits:

Normally Ritser stayed up on theHand ’s bridge, where he could maintain a command perspective on the L1 rubble pile and Arachna far beyond. But with Ciret and Marli helping out on Hammerfest, there were just Tan and Kal Omo to run nearly one hundred Security snoops. So today he was mucking around in the guts of the operation with Omo and Tan.

“Vinh has tripped three flags this Watch, Podmaster. Two times during the runaway, as matter of fact.”

As he floated in over Omo, Ritser glanced down at the zipheads on Watch. About a third were asleep in their saddles. The rest were immersed in data streams, reviewing the logs, correlating their results with Reynolt’s Focused on Hammerfest. “Okay, so what do you have on him?”

“This is camera analysis of Reynolt’s lab and a corridor near Podmaster Nau’s residence.” The scenes flickered by quickly, highlighted where the snoops had seen exceptionable body language.

“Nothing overt?”

Omo’s hatchetlike face spread in a humorless smile. “Plenty that would be actionable back home, but not under the current RoE.”

“I’ll bet.” Podmaster Nau’s Rules of Enforcement would have been reason for his instant removal anywhere in the Emergency. For more than twenty years, the Senior Podmaster had let the Peddler swine get away with their excesses, perverting law-abiding Followers in the process. It had driven Ritser to distraction at first. Now… Now he could understand. Tomas was right about so many things. They had no margin for further destruction. And letting people talk yielded a lot of information, secrets they could use when the noose was retightened. “So what’s different about this time?”

“Analysts Seven and Eight both correlate on the last two events.” Seven and Eight were the zipheads at the end of the first row. As children they might have had names, but that was long ago and before they entered the Police Academy. Frivolous names and “Doctor” titles might be used in civilian work, but not in a serious police shop. “Vinh is intent on something that goes beyond his normal anxiety. Look at this head tracking.”

It didn’t mean anything to Ritser, but then his job was to lead, not to understand forensic details. Omo continued, “He’s watching Trinli with great suspicion. It happens again in the corridor by the taxi locks.”

Brughel riffled through the video index of Vinh’s visit to Hammerfest. “Okay. He fought Trinli. He harassed Trud Silipan. Lordy—” Brughel couldn’t help laughing. “—heassaulted Tomas Nau’s private whore. But you say the security flags are for eye contact and body language?”

Omo shrugged. “The overt behavior fits with the guy’s known problems, sir. And it doesn’t come under the RoE.”

So Qiwi Lisolet got slapped around, right on Tomas’s doorstep. Ritser found himself grinning at the irony. All these years, Tomas had fooled the little slut. The periodic mindscrubs had come to be a bright spot in Ritser’s life, especially since he saw her reaction to a certain video. Still, he couldn’t deny his envy. He, Ritser Brughel, couldn’t have maintained a masquerade, even with mindscrubs. Ritser’s own women just didn’t last. A couple of times a year, he had go back to Tomas and wheedle more playthings out of him. Ritser had used up the most attractive expendables. Sometimes he had a bit of luck, as with Floria Peres. She would have noticed Qiwi’s mindscrub for sure; chemical engineer or no, she had to be taken down. But there were limits to such good fortune… and the Exile stretched out years more ahead of him. The thought was dark and familiar, and he resolutely pushed it away.

“Okay. So your point is, Seven and Eight figure that Vinh is hiding something that wasn’t in his consciousness before—at least not at this level of intensity.”

Back in civilization, there’d have been no problem. They’d just bring the perp in and cut the answers out of him. Here… well, they’d had their chance to do some cutting; they had learned disappointingly little. Too many of the Qeng Ho had effective blocks, and too many couldn’t be properly infected with mindrot.

He cycled through the highlighted incidents. “Hmm. Do you suppose he’s figured out that Trinli is really Zamle Eng?” The Peddlers were crazy; they tolerated almost any corruption, but had blood hatred for one of their own simply because he traded in flesh. Ritser’s lip turned in disgust.Pus.How far we’ve fallen. Blackmail was a fitting weapon between Podmasters,but simple terror should suffice for people like Pham Trinli. He scanned once more through Omo’s evidence. It was really frail. “Sometimes I wonder, maybe we have the trigger threshold set too low on our snoops.”

That was something that Omo had suggested before. The podsergeant was too clever to gloat, however. “It’s possible, sir. On the other hand, if there weren’t questions left for managers to decide, there would be no need for real people.” The vision of one Podmaster ruling a universe of Focused was fantasy fiction. “You know what I wish, Podmaster Brughel?”

“What?”

“I wish we could bring those run-alone Qeng Ho localizers aboard Hammerfest. There’s something perverse about havingworse security in our own space than we do in the Qeng Ho temp. If these incidents had happened aboard the temp, we would have had Vinh’s blood pressure, his heart rate—hell, if the localizers are on the subject’s scalp, we’d have EEG. Between the Peddlers’ signal processors and our zipheads, we could practically read the subject’s bloody mind.”

“Yeah, I know.” The Qeng Ho localizers were an almost magical improvement over previous standards of law enforcement. There were hundreds of thousands of the millimeter-size devices all through the Peddler temp—probably hundreds in the open areas of Hammerfest since Nau had relaxed the frat rules. All they had to do was reprogram Hammerfest’s utility system for pulsed microwave, and the localizers’ reach would be instantly extended. They could say goodbye to camera patches and similar clumsy gear. “I’ll bring this up again with Podmaster Nau.” Anne’s programmers had been studying the Peddler localizers for more than two years, futilely searching for hidden gotchas.

In the meantime… “Well, Ezr Vinh is back aboard the temp now, with all the localizer coverage you could dream of.” He grinned at Omo. “Divert a couple more zipheads onto him. Let’s see how much an intense analysis can show.”

Ezr got through the emergency without cracking up again. Regular reports emerged from Hammerfest. The mindrot runaway had been stopped. Xopi Reung and eight other Focused persons had died. Three more were “seriously damaged.” But Trixia was marked as “returned to service, undamaged.”

The speculations swept back and forth across Benny’s parlor. Rita was sure the runaway was a near-random crash. “We used to get them every couple of years in my shop on Balacrea; only one time did we nail the cause. It’s the price you pay for close-coupling.” But she and Jau Xin were afraid the runaway would eliminate even delayed audio translations of “The Children’s Hour.” Gonle Fong said that didn’t matter, that Sherkaner Underhill had lost his strange debate with Pedure and so there wouldn’t be any more broadcasts to translate. Trud Silipan was gone from the discussion; he was still over on Hammerfest, maybe working for a change. Pham Trinli made up for that, spouting Silipan’s theory that Trixia had been acting out a real fight—and that had precipitated the runaway. Ezr listened to it all, numb and silent.

His next duty was in 40Ksec; Ezr went back to his quarters early. It would be a while before he could face Benny’s again. So many things had happened, and they were all shameful or hurting or lethally mysterious. He floated in the semidarkness of his room, skewered on Hell’s rotisserie. He’d think impotently on one problem for a time… and then escape to something that soon was equally terrible, and then escape again… finally returning to the first horror.

Qiwi.That was his shame. He had struck her twice. Hard.If PhamTrinli had not interfered, would I have gone on beating her? There was a horror opening up before him that he had never imagined. Sure, he had always been afraid that someday he would blunder, or even be a coward, but… today he had seen something in himself, something basically indecent. Qiwi had helped to put Trixia on exhibit. Sure. But she wasn’t the only one involved. And yes, Qiwi did benefit under Tomas Nau… but Lord, she’d been only a child when all this began.So why did I go afterher? Because she had once seemed to care? Because she wouldn’t fight back? That was what the implacable voice in the back of his mind insisted. At bottom, maybe Ezr Vinh was not just incompetent or weak, maybe he was simply filth. Ezr’s mind danced round and round that conclusion, closing ever tighter, until he escaped out sideways to—

Pham Trinli.That was the mystery. Trinli had acted twice yesterday, both times saving Ezr from being an even greater fool and villain. There was a crust of blood across the back of his head, where Trinli’s “clumsy” body block had smashed him into the wall. Ezr had seen Trinli in the temp’s gym. The old man made a thing of exercise, but his body wasn’t in especially good shape. His reaction time was nothing spectacular. But somehow he knew how to move, how to make accidents happen. And thinking back, Ezr remembered times before when Pham Trinli had been in the right place…. The temp park right after the massacre.What had the old man actually said? It hadn’t revealed anything to the cameras, it hadn’t even tweaked Ezr’s own attention—but something he said had wakened the certainty that Jimmy Diem had been murdered, that Jimmy was innocent of all Nau claimed. Everything Pham did was loud and self-serving and incompetent, yet… Ezr thought back and forth over all the details, the things he might be seeing that others would miss. Maybe he was seeing mirages in his desperation. When problems go beyond hope of solution, insanity comes creeping. And yesterday, something had broken inside him….

Trixia.That was the pain and the rage and the fear. Yesterday Trixia had come very close to death, her body as tortured and twisted as Xopi Reung’s. Maybe even worse…. He remembered the look on her face when she came out of the MRI programmer. Trud said her linguistics ability had been temporarily detuned. Maybe that was the cause for her desperation, losing the one thing that still had meaning for her. And maybe he lied, as he suspected Reynolt and Nau and Brughel lied about many things. Maybe Trixiahad been briefly deFocused and looked about her, and seen how she had aged, and realized that they had taken her life. And I may never know. I will continue to watch her year after year, impotent and raging and… silent. There had to be someone to strike against, to punish….

And so the rotisserie cycled back to Qiwi.

Two Ksec passed, four. Enough time to return again and again to problems that were beyond solution. This sort of thing had happened a few terrible times before. Sometimes he’d spend the whole night on the rotisserie. Sometimes he got so tired, he’d just fall asleep—and that would stop it. Tonight, the nth time thinking on Pham Trinli, Ezr got angry at the process. So what if he was crazy? If all he had were mirages of salvation, well then,grab them ! Vinh got up and put on his huds. Awkward seconds were spent getting through the library access routines. He still wasn’t used to the crummy Emergent I/O interface, and they had yet to enable decent customization. But then the windows around him lit up with text from the latest report he was doing for Nau.

So, what did he know about Pham Trinli? In particular, what did he know that had escaped the notice of Nau and Brughel? The fellow had an uncanny ability in hand-to-hand fighting—mugging, more accurately. And he cloaked the ability from the Emergents; he was playing a game with them…. And after today, he must know that Vinh knew this.

Maybe Trinli was simply an aging criminal doing his best to blend in and survive. But then what about the localizers? Trinli had revealed their secret to Tomas Nau, and that secret had increased Nau’s power a hundredfold. The tiny flecks of automation were everywhere. There on his knuckle—that might be a glint of sweat, but it also might be a localizer. The little glints and flecks could be reporting the position of his arms, some of his fingers, the angle of his head. Nau’s snoops could know it all.

Those capabilities were simply not documented in the fleet library, even with top-level passwords. So Pham Trinli knew secrets that went deep in the Qeng Ho past. And very likely what he had revealed to Tomas Nau was just a cover for… what?

Ezr pounded on that question for a few moments, got nowhere. Think about the man. Pham Trinli. He was an old thug. He knew important secretsabove the level of Qeng Ho fleet secrets. Most likely, he had been in at the founding of the modern Qeng Ho, when Pham Nuwen and Sura Vinh and the Council of the Gap had done their work. So Trinli was enormously old in objective years. That was not impossible, nor even excessively rare. Long trading missions could take a Trader across a thousand years of objective time. His parents had had one or two friends who had actually walked on Old Earth. Yet it was highly unlikely any of them had access to the founding layers of Qeng Ho automation.

No, if Trinli was what Ezr’s insane reasoning implied, then he would likely be a figure visible in the histories. Who?

Vinh’s fingers tapped at the keyboard. His ongoing assignment was a good cover for the questions he wanted to ask. Nau had an insatiable interest in everything Qeng Ho. Vinh was to write him summaries, and propose research tracks for the zipheads. However mellow and diplomatic he might seem, Ezr had long ago realized that Nau was even crazier than Brughel. Nau studied in order to someday rule.

Be careful.The places he really wanted to look must be fully covered by the needs of his report writing. On top of it all, he must keep up a random pattern of truly irrelevant references. Let the snoops try to find his intent in those!

He needed a list: Qeng Ho males, alive at the beginning of the modern Qeng Ho, who were not known to be dead at the time Captain Park’s expedition left Triland. The list shrank substantially when he also eliminated those known to be far from this corner of Human Space. It shrank again when he required that they be present at Brisgo Gap. The conjunction of five booleans, the work of a spoken command or a column of keystrokes—but Ezr could not afford such simplicity. Each boolean was part of other searches, in support of things he really needed for the report. The results were scattered across pages of analysis, a name here, a name there. The orrery floating by the ceiling showed less than 15Ksec remaining before the walls of his quarters would begin to glow dawnlight… but he had his list. Did it mean anything? A handful of names, some pale and improbable. The booleans themselves were very hazy. The Qeng Ho interstellar net was an enormous thing, in a sense the largest structure in the histories of Humankind. But it was all out of date, by years or centuries. And even the Qeng Ho sometimes lied among themselves, especially where the distances were short and confusion could give commercial advantage. A handful of names. How many and who? Even scanning the list was painstakingly slow, else the hidden watchers would surely notice. Some names he recognized: Tran Vinh.21, that was Sura Vinh’s g’grandson and the male-side founder of Ezr’s own branch of the Vinh Family; King Xen.03, Sura’s chief armsman at Brisgo Gap. Xen could not have been Trinli. He was just over 120 centimeters tall, and nearly as wide. Other names belonged to people who had never been famous. Jung, Trap, Park… Park?

Vinh couldn’t help the surprise. If Brughel’s zipheads reviewed the records, they would surely notice. The damn localizers could probably pick up on pulse, maybe even blood pressure.If they can see the surprise, make it a big thing. “Lord of All Trade,” Vinh whispered, bringing the picture and bio material up on all his windows. It really did look like their own S. J. Park, Fleet Captain of the mission to the OnOff star. He remembered the man from his own childhood; that Park hadn’t seemed so very old…. In fact, some of this biodata seemed vague. And the DNA record did not match the latter-day Park. Hmm. That might be enough to deflect Nau and Reynolt; they didn’t have Ezr’s firsthand experience with backstairs Family affairs. But the S. J. Park at Brisgo Gap—two thousand years ago—had been a ship’s captain. He’d ended up with Ratko Vinh. There had been some weird scandal involving a failed marriage contract. After that, there was nothing.

Vinh followed a couple of obvious leads on Park—then gave up, the way you might when you learned something surprising but not universe-breaking. The other names on the list… it took him another Ksec to get through them, and none looked familiar. His mind kept returning to S. J. Park, and he almost panicked.How well can the enemy read me? He looked at some pictures of Trixia, surrendered to the familiar pain; he did that often enough just before finally going to bed. Behind his tears, his mind raced. If Ezr was right about Park, he went way,way back. No wonder his parents had treated Park as more than a young contract captain. Lord, he could have been on Pham Nuwen’s voyage to the far side. After Brisgo Gap, when Nuwen was about as rich as he’d ever been, he’d departed with a grand fleet, heading for the far side of Human Space. That was typical of Nuwen’s gestures. The far side was at least four hundred light-years away. The merchanting details of its environment were ancient history by the time they arrived on this side. And his proposed path would take him through some of the oldest regions of Human Space. For centuries after the departure, the Qeng Ho Net continued to report the progress of the Prince of Canberra, of his fleets growing and sometimes shrinking. Then the stories faltered, often lacked valid authentication. Nuwen probably never got more than partway to his goal. As a child, Ezr and his friends had often played at being the Lost Prince. There were so many ways it might have ended, some adventurous and gruesome, some—the most likely—involving old age and a string of business failures, ships lost to bankruptcy across dozens of light-years. And so the fleet had never returned.

But parts of it might have.A person here or there, perhaps losing heart with a voyage that would take them forever far from their own time. Who knew just which individuals returned? Very likely, S. J. Park had known. Very likely S. J. Park had known precisely who Pham Trinli was—and had worked to protect that identity. Who from the era of Brisgo Gap could be so important, so well known…? S. J. Park had been loyal to someone from that era. Who?

And then Ezr remembered hearing that Captain Park had personally chosen the name of his flagship. The Pham Nuwen.

Pham Trinli. Pham Nuwen. The Lost Prince of Canberra.

And I have finally gone totally crazy. There were library checks that would shoot down this conclusion in a second. Yes, and that would disprove nothing; if he were right, the library itself would be a subtle lie.Yeah, sure. This was the sort of desperate hallucination he must guard against. If you raise your desires high enough, certainty can grow out of the background noise. But at least it got me off the rotisserie!

It was awfully late. He stared at the pictures of Trixia for a while longer, lost in sad memories. Inside, he calmed down. There would be other false alarms, but he had years ahead of him, a lifetime of patient looking. He would find a crack in the dungeon somewhere, and when it happened he wouldn’t have to wonder if it was a trick of his imagination.

Sleep came, and dreams filled with all the usual distress and the new shame, and now mixed with his latest insanity. Eventually there was something like peace, floating in the dark of his cabin. Mindless.

And then another dream, so real that he didn’t doubt it until it was over. Little lights were shining in his eyes, but only when he kept his eyes closed. Awake and sitting, the room was dark as ever. Lying down, eyes asleep, then the sparkles started again.

The lights were talking to him, a game of blinkertalk. When he was very young he had played a lot of that, flitting from rock to rock across the out-of-doors. Tonight, a single pattern repeated and repeated, and in Vinh’s dream state the meaning formed almost effortlessly:

“NOD UR HEAD IF U UNDRSTND ME…. NOD—”

Vinh made a wordless groan of surprise—and the pattern changed:

“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP…” for a long time. And then it changed again. “NOD UR HEAD IF U UNDRSTND ME….”

That was easy too. Vinh moved his head a fraction of a centimeter.

“OK. PRETEND TO BE ASLEEP. CLOSE UR HAND. BLINK ON PALM.”

After all the years, conspiracy was suddenly so easy. Just pretend your palm was a keyboard and type at your fellow-conspirators. Of course! His hands were under the covers, so no one else could see! He would have laughed out loud at the cleverness, except that would be out of character. It was so obvious now who had come to save them. He closed his right hand and tapped: “HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?”

For a long time there were no more little flashes. Ezr’s mind drifted slowly toward deeper sleep.

Then: “U NU BFR TNITE? DAM ME.” Another long pause. “I VRY SORRY. I THOT U BROKN.”

Vinh nodded to himself, a little proud. And maybe someday Qiwi would forgive him, and Trixia would return to life, and…

“OK,” Ezr tapped at the Prince. “HOW MNY PEOPLE WE GOT?”

“SECRET. ONLY I KNO. EACH CAN TALK BUT NO ONE KNOS ANYONE ELSE.” Pause. “TILL U TONITE.”

Aha. Almost the perfect conspiracy. The members could cooperate, but no one but the Prince could betray anyone else. Things would be so much easier now.

“WELL IM VRY TIRED NOW. WANNA SLEEP. WE CAN TALK MORE LATR.”

Pause. Was his request so strange? Nights are for sleeping. “OK. LATR.”

As consciousness drifted finally away, Vinh shrugged deeper into his hammock and smiled to himself. He was not alone. And all along, the secret had been as close as his hand. Amazing!

The next morning, Vinh woke up rested and strangely happy. Huh. What had he done to deserve this?

He floated into the shower bag and sudsed up. Yesterday had been so dark, so shameful. Bitter reality seeped back into him, but strangely slow…. Yeah, there had been a dream.That was not unusual, but most of his dreams hurt so much to remember. Vinh turned the shower to dry and hung for a moment in the swirling jets of air. What had it been about this one?

Yes! It was another of those miracle escape dreams, but this time things hadn’t turned bad at the end. Nau and Brughel had not leaped out of hiding at the last moment.

So what had been the secret weapon this time? Oh, the usual illogic of dreams, some kind of magic that turned his own hands into a comm link with the chief conspirator. Pham Trinli? Ezr chuckled at the thought. Some dreams are more absurd than others; strange how he still felt comforted by this one.

He shrugged into his clothes and set off down the temp’s corridors, his progress the typical zero-gee push, pull, bounce at the turns, swing to avoid those moving more slowly or going in the other direction.Pham Nuwen.Pham Trinli. There must be a billion people with that given name, and a hundred flagships namedPham Nuwen. Recollection of his library search of the night before gradually percolated back to mind, the crazy ideas he’d been thinking just before he went to bed.

But the truth about Captain Park had been no dream. By the time he arrived at the dayroom, he was moving more slowly.

Ezr drifted headfirst into the dayroom, said hello to Hunte Wen by the door. The atmosphere was relatively relaxed. He quickly discovered that Reynolt had brought her surviving Focused back online; there had been no more flareups. On the far ceiling, Pham Trinli was pontificating about what had caused the runaway and why the danger was past. This was the Pham Trinli he had dealt with several Ksecs of each wake period on every overlapping Watch since the ambush. Suddenly the dream and the library session before it were reduced to the proper and completely absurd perspective.

Trinli must have heard him talking to Hunte. The old fraud turned, and for a moment looked back down the room at Vinh. He didn’t say anything, didn’t nod, and even if an Emergent spy were looking right down Vinh’s line of sight, it would have not likely mattered. But to Ezr Vinh, the moment seemed to last forever. In that moment, the buffoon that had been Pham Trinli was gone. There was no bluster in that face, but there was lonely, quiet authority and an acknowledgment of their strange conversation of the night before. Somehow it had not been a dream. The communication had not been magical. And this old man truly was the Lost Prince of Canberra.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“But it’s firstsnow. Don’t you want to see it?” Victory’s voice took on a whine, a tone that worked with virtually no one except this one older brother.

“You’ve played in snow before.”

Sure, when Daddy took them on trips to the far north. “But Brent! This is firstsnow at Princeton. The radio says it’s all over the Craggies.” Brent was absorbed in his dowel and hub frameworks, endless shiny surfaces that got more and more complicated. By himself, he never would have considered sneaking out of the house. He continued working at his designs for several seconds, ignoring her. Infact, that was how Brent treated the unexpected. He was quite good with his hands, but ideas came slowly to him. Beyond that he was very shy—surly, grown-ups often said. His head didn’t move, but Viki could tell he was looking at her. His hands never slowed as they weaved back and forth across the surface of the model, sometimes building, sometimes wrecking. Finally, he said, “We aren’t supposed to go out ’less we tell Dad.”

“Pfui. You know he sleeps in. This morning is the coldest yet, but we’ll miss it if we don’t go now. Hey, I’ll leave a note for him.”

Her sister Gokna would have argued the point back and forth, finally exceeding Viki herself in clever rationalizations. Her brother Jirlib would have gotten angry at her manipulation. But Brent didn’t argue, returning instead to his finicky modeling for a few minutes, part of him watching her, part of him studying the dowel and connector pattern that emerged from beneath his hands, and part of him looking out across Princeton at the tinge of frost on the near ridges. Of all her brothers and sisters, he was the one who wouldn’t really want to go. On the other hand, he was the only one she could find this morning, and he was even more grown-up-looking than Jirlib.

After a few moments more, he said, “Well, okay, if that’s what you want.” Victory grinned to herself; as if the outcome were ever in doubt. Getting past Captain Downing would be harder—but not by much.

It was early morning. The sunlight hadn’t reached the streets below Hill House. Victory savored each breath, the faint stinging she felt at the sides of her chest as she tasted the frosty air. The hot blossoms and woods-fairies were still wound tight in the tree branches; they might not even come out today. But there were other things about, things she had only read about before now. In the frost of the coldest hollows, crystal worms edged slowly out. These brave little pioneers wouldn’t last long—Viki remembered the radio show she had done about them last year. These little ones would keep dying except where the cold was good enough to last all day long. And even then, things would have to get much colder before the rooted variety showed up.

Viki skipped briskly through the morning chill, easily keeping up with the slower, longer strides of her big brother. This early there was hardly anyone about. Except for the sound of distant contruction work, she could almost imagine that they were all alone, that the city was deserted. Imagine what it would be like in coming years, when the cold stayed, and they could only go out as Daddy had done in the war with the Tiefers. All the way to the bottom of the hill, Viki built on the idea, turning every aspect of the chilly morning into the fantastical. Brent listened, occasionally offering a suggestion that would have surprised most of Daddy’s grown-up friends. Brent was not so dumb, and he did have an imagination.

The Craggies were thirty miles away, beyond the King’s high castle, beyond the far side of Princeton. No way could they walk there. But today lots of people wanted to travel to the near mountains. Firstsnow meant a fair-sized festival in every land, though of course it happened at various and unpredictable times. Viki knew that if the early snow had been predicted, Dad would have been up early, and Mom might have flown in from Lands Command. The outing would have been a major family affair—but not the least bit adventurous.

A sort of adventure began at the bottom of the hill. Brent was sixteen years old now and he was big for his age. He could pass for in-phase. He had been out on his own often enough before. He said he knew where the express buses made their stops. Today, there were no buses, and scarcely any traffic. Had everyone already gone to the mountains?

Brent marched from one bus stop to another, gradually becoming more agitated. Viki tagged along silently, for once not making any suggestions; Brent got put down often enough that he rarely asserted any sort of knowledge. It hurt when he finally spoke up—even to a little sister—and then turned out to be wrong. After the third false start, Brent hunkered down close to the ground. For a moment, Viki thought maybe he was just going to wait for a bus to come along—a thoroughly unpleasant possibility to Viki. They’d been out for more than an hour and they hadn’t even seen a local jitney. Maybe she would have to stick her pointy little hands into the problem…. But after a minute, Brent stood up and started across the street. “I bet the Big Dig people didn’t get the day off. That’s only a mile south of here. There are always buses from there.”

Ha.That was just what Viki had been about to suggest. Blessed be patience.

The street was still in morning shadow. This was the deepest part of the winter season at Princeton. Here and there the frost in the darker nooks was so deep that it might have been snow itself. But the section they were walking through now was not gardened. The only plants were unruly weeds and free crawlers. On sweaty, hot days between storms, the place would have been alive with midges and drinkers.

On either side of the street were multistory warehouses. Things weren’t so quiet and deserted here. The ground buzzed and thrummed with the sound of unseen diggers. Freight trucks moved in and out of the area. Every few hundred yards, a plot of land was barricaded off from all but the construction crews. Viki tugged at Brent’s arms, urging him to crawl under the barricades. “Hey, it’s our dad who’s the reason for all this. We deserve to see!” Brent would never accept such a rationalization, but his little sister was already past the no-trespassing signs. He had to come along just to protect her.

They crept past tall bundles of reinforcement steel, and piles of masonry. There was something powerful and alien about this place. In the house on the hill, everything was so safe, so orderly. Here… well, she could see endless opportunities for the careless to lacerate a foot, cut an eye. Heck, if you tipped over one of those standing slabs, it would squash you flat. All the possibilities were crystal clear in her mind… and exciting. They carefully made their way to the lip of a caisson, avoiding the eyes of the workman and the various interesting opportunities for fatal accidents.

The railing was two strands of twine.If you don’t want to die, don’t falloff! Viki and her brother hunkered close to the ground and stuck their heads over the abyss. For a moment, it was too dark to see. The heated air that drifted up carried the smell of burning oil and hot metal. It was a caress and a slap in the head all at once. And the sounds: workers shouting, metal grinding against metal, engines, and a strange hissing. Viki dipped her head, letting all her eyes adjust to the gloom. There was light, but nothing like day or night. She had seen small electric-arc lamps in Daddy’s labs. These ones were huge: pencils of light glowing mostly in the ultra and far ultra—colors you never see bright except in the disk of the sun. The color splashed off the hooded workers, spread speckling glints up and down the shaft…. There were other less spectacular lights, steadier ones, electric lamps that shone local splotches of tamed color here and there. Still twelve years before the Dark, and they were building a whole city down there. She could see avenues of stone, huge tunnels leading off from the walls of the shaft. And in the tunnels she glimpsed darker holes… ramps to smaller diggings? Buildings and homes and gardens would come later, but already the caves were mostly dug. Looking down, Viki felt an attraction that was new to her, the natural, protective attraction of a deepness. But what these workers were doing was a thousand times grander than any ordinary deepness. If all you wanted to do was sleep frozen through the Dark, you needed just enough space for your sleeping pool and a startup cache. Such already existed in the city deepness beneath the old town center—and had existed there for almost twenty generations. This new construction was tolive in, awake. In some places, where air seal and insulation could be assured, it was built right at ground level. In other areas, it was dug down hundreds of feet, an eerie reverse of the buildings that made Princeton’s skyline.

Viki stared and stared, lost in the dream. Until now, it had all been a story at a distance. Little Victory read about it, heard her parents talk about it, heard it on the radio. She knew that as much as anything, it was the reason why so many people hated her family. That, and being oophase, were the reasons they weren’t supposed to go out alone. Dad might talk and talk about evolution in action and how important it was for small children to be allowed to take chances, how if that didn’t happen then genius could not develop in the survivors. The trouble was, he didn’t mean it. Every time Viki tried to take on something a little risky, Dad got all paternal and the project became a padded security blanket.

Viki realized she was chuckling low in her chest.

“What?” said Brent.

“Nothing. I was just thinking that today we are getting to see what things are really like—Daddy or no.”

Brent’s aspect shifted into embarrassment. Of all her brothers and sisters, he was the one who took rules the most literally and felt the worst about bending them. “I think we should leave now. There are workers on the surface, getting closer. Besides, how long does the snow last?”

Grumble. Viki backed out and followed her brother through the maze of wonderfully massive things that filled the construction yard. At the moment, even the prospect of snowdrifts was not an irresistible attraction.

The first real surprise of the day came when they finally reached an in-use express stop: Standing a little apart from the crowd were Jirlib and Gokna. No wonder she hadn’t been able to find them this morning. They had snuck off without her! Viki sidled across the plaza toward them, trying to look not the least perturbed. Gokna was grinning her usual one-upness. Jirlib had the grace to look embarrassed. Along with Brent he was the oldest, and should have had the sense to prevent this outing. The four of them drifted a few yards away from the stares and stuck their heads together.

Buzz, mumble. Miss One-Upness: “What took you so long? Had trouble sneaking past Downing’s Detainers?” Viki: “I didn’t thinkyou would even dare try. We’ve done lots already this morning.” Miss One-Upness: “Like what?” Viki: “Like we checked out the New Underground.” Miss One-Upness: “Well—”

Jirlib: “Shut up the both of you. Neither of you should be out here.”

“But we’re radio celebrities, Jirlib.” Gokna preened. “People love us.”

Jirlib moved a little closer and lowered his voice. “Quit it. For every three who like ‘The Children’s Hour,’ there are three that it worries—and four more are trads who still hate your guts.”

The children’s radio hour had been more fun than anything Viki had ever done, but it hadn’t been the same since Honored Pedure. Now that their age was public, it was like they had to prove something. They had even found some other oophases—but so far none were right for the show. Viki and Gokna hadn’t gotten friendly with other cobblies, even the pair that had been their age. They were strange, unfriendly children—almost the stereotype of oophase. Daddy said it was their upbringing, the years in hiding. That was the scariest thing of all, something she only talked about with Gokna, and then only in whispers in the middle of the night. What if the Church was right? Maybe she and Gokna just imagined they had souls.

For a moment, the four of them stood silently, taking Jirlib’s point. Then Brent asked, “So why are you out here, Jirlib?” From anyone else it would have been a challenge, but verbal fighting was outside Brent’s scope. The question was simple curiosity, an honest request for enlightenment.

As such, it poked deeper than any gibe. “Um, yeah. I’m on my way downtown. The Royal Museum has an exhibit about the Distorts of Khelm…. I’m not a problem. I look quite old enough to be in-phase.” That last was true. Jirlib wasn’t as big as Brent, but he already had the beginning of paternal fur showing through the slits of his jacket. But Viki wasn’t going to let him off that easily. She jabbed a hand in Gokna’s direction: “So what is this? Your pet tarant?”

Little Miss One-Upness smiled sweetly. Jirlib’s whole aspect was a glare. “You two are walking disaster areas, you know that?” Exactly how had Gokna fooled Jirlib into taking her along? The question sparked real professional interest in Viki. She and Gokna were by far the best manipulators in the whole family. That was why they got along so badly with each other.

“We at least have a valid academic reason for our trip,” said Gokna. “What’s your excuse?”

Viki waved her eating hands in her sister’s face. “We’re going to see the snow. That’s a learning experience.”

“Hah! You just want to roll in it.”

“Shut up.” Jirlib raised his head, took in the various bystanders back at the express stop. “We should all go home.”

Gokna shifted into persuasion mode: “But Jirlib, that would be worse. It’s a long walk back. Let’s take the bus to the museum—see, it’s coming right now.” The timing was perfect. An express had just turned onto the uphill thoroughfare. Its near-red lights marked it as part of the downtown loop. “By the time we get done there, the snow fanatics should be back in town and there’ll be an express running all the way back home.”

“Hey, I didn’t come down here to see some fake alien magic! I want to see the snow.”

Gokna shrugged. “Too bad, Viki. You can always stick your head in an icebox when we get home.”

“I—” Viki saw that Jirlib had reached the end of his patience, and she didn’t have any real counterargument. A word from him to Brent, and Viki would find herself carried willy-nilly back to the house. “—uh, what a fine day to go to the museum.”

Jirlib gave a sour smile. “Yeah, and when we arrive we’ll probably find Rhapsa and Little Hrunk already there, having sweet-talked security into driving them down direct.” That started Viki and Gokna laughing. The two littlest ones were more than babies now, but they still hung around Dad nearly all the day. The image of them outsmarting Mother’s security team was a bit much.

The four of them maneuvered back to the edge of the crowd, and were the last to board the express…. Oh well. Four really was safer than two, and the Royal Museum was in a safe part of town. Even if Dad caught on, the children’s evident planning and caution would excuse them. And for all the rest of her life there would be the snow.

Public expresses were nothing like the cars and airplanes that Viki was used to. Here everyone was packed close. Rope netting—almost like babies’ gymnets—hung in sheets spaced every five feet down the length of the bus. Passengers spread arms and legs ignominiously through the web-work and hung vertically from the ropes. It made it possible to pack more people on board, but it felt pretty silly. Only the driver had aproper perch.

This bus wouldn’t have been crowded—except that the other passengers gave the children a wide berth.Well, they can all shrivel. I don’t care. She stopped watching the other passengers, and studied the cross streets streaming past.

With all the work going on underground, there were places where street repairs had been neglected. Every bump and pothole set the rope netting asway—kind of fun. Then things smoothed out. They were entering the poshest section of the new downtown. She recognized some of the insignias on the towers above them, corporations like Under Power and Regency Radionics. Some of the largest companies in the Accord wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for her father. It made her proud to see all the people going in and out of those buildings. Dad was important in a good way to many people.

Brent swayed out from the rope netting, his head coming close to hers. “You know, I think we’re being followed.”

Jirlib heard the quiet words too, and stiffened on the ropes. “Huh? Where?”

“Those two Roadmasters. They were parked near the bus stop.”

For a second, Viki felt a little thrill of fear—and then relief. She laughed. “I bet we didn’t fool anyone this morning. Dad let us go, and Captain Downing’s people are following along the way they always like to do.”

Brent said, “These cars don’t look like any of the usual ones.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Royal Museum was at the City Center express stop. Viki and her siblings were deposited on the very steps of the place.

For a moment Viki and Gokna were speechless, staring upward at the curving stone arch. They had done a show about this place, but they had never been here. The Royal Museum was only three stories tall, dwarfed by the buildings of modern times. But the smaller building was something more than all the skyscrapers. Except for fortifications, the museum was the oldest intact surface structure in Princeton. In fact, it had been the Royals’ principal museum for the last five cycles of the sun. There had been some rebuilding, and some extensions, but one of the traditions of the place was that it should remain true to King Longarms’s vision. The outside sloped in a curving arch, almost like an inverted section of aircraft wing. The wind-run arch was the invention of architects two generations before the scientific era. The ancient buildings at Lands Command were nothing compared with this; they had the protection of deep valley walls. For a moment, Viki tried to imagine what it must be like here in the days right after the sun came to life: the building hunkered low beneath winds blasting at near sound-speed, the sun blazing hell-bright in all the colors from ultra to farthest red. So why did King Longarms build right on the surface? To dare the Dark and the Sun, of course. To rise above the deep little hidey-holes andrule.

“Hey you two! Are you asleep, or what?” Jirlib’s voice jabbed at them. He and Brent were looking back from the entrance. The girls scrambled up the steps, and for once didn’t have any smart reply.

Jirlib continued on, mumbling to himself about daydreaming twits. Brent dropped behind the other three, but followed close.

They passed into the shade of the entryway, and the sounds of the city faded behind. A ceremonial guard of two King’s troopers perched silently in ambush niches on either side of the entrance. Up ahead was the real guardian—the ticket clerk. The ancient walls behind his stand were hung with announcements of the current exhibits. Jirlib was grumbling no more. He jittered around a twelve-color “artist’s conception” of a Distort of Khelm. And now Viki could see how such foolishness had made it into the Royal Museum. It wasn’t just the Distorts. This season’s museum theme was “Crank Science in All Its Aspects.” The posters advertised exhibits on deepness-witching, autocombustion, videomancy, and—ta-da!—the Distorts of Khelm. But Jirlib seemed oblivious of the company his hobby was keeping. It was enough for him that a museum finally honored it.

The current-theme exhibits were in the new wing. Here the ceilings were high, and mirrored pipes showered sunlight in misty cones upon the marble floors. The four of them were almost alone, and the place had an eerie quality of sound about it, not quite echoing, but magnifying. When they weren’t talking, even the tick of their feet seemed loud. It worked better than any “Quiet Please” signs. Viki was awed by all the incredible quackery. Daddy thought such things were amusing—“like religion but not so deadly.” Unfortunately, Jirlib had eyes only for his own quackery. Never mind that Gokna was engrossed by the autocombustion exhibit to the point of active scheming. Never mind that Viki wanted to see the glowing picture tubes in the videomancy hall. Jirlib was going straight to the Distorts exhibit, and he and Brent made sure their sisters stayed right with them.

Ah, well. In truth, Viki had always been intrigued by the Distorts. Jirlib had been stuck on them for as long as she could remember; here, finally, they would get to see the real thing.

The entrance to the hall was a floor-to-ceiling exhibit of diamond foraminifera. How many tons of fuel sludge had been sifted to find such perfect specimens? The different types were carefully labeled according to the best scientific theories, but the tiny crystal skeletons had been artfully positioned in their trays behind magnifying lenses: in the piped sunlight, the forams glittered in crystal constellations like jeweled tiaras and bracelets and backdrapes. It reduced Jirlib’s collection to in significance. On a central table, a bank of microscopes gave the interested visitor a closer look. Viki stared through the lenses. She had seen this sort of thing often enough before, but these forams were undamaged and the variety was boggling. Most were six-way symmetric, yet there were many that had the little hooks and wands that the living creatures must have used to move around in their microscopic environment. Not a single diamond skeleton creature lived in the world anymore, and none had for more than fifty million years. But in some sedimentary rock, the diamond foram layer was hundreds of feet thick; out east, it was a cheaper fuel than coal. The largest of the critters was barely flea-sized, but there had been a time when they were the most common animal in the world. Then, about fifty million years ago—poof. All that was left was their skeletons. Uncle Hrunkner said that was something to think about when Daddy’s ideas went over the top.

“C’mon, c’mon.” Jirlib could spend hours at a time with his own foram collection. But today, he gave the ranked glitter of the King’s Own Exhibit barely thirty seconds; the signs on the far doors proclaimed the Distorts of Khelm. The four of them ticktoed to the darkened entrance, scarcely whispering to one another now. In the hall beyond, a single cone of piped sunlight shone down on the central tables. The walls were drowned in shadow, lit here and there by lamps of the extreme colors.

The four eased quietly into the room. Gokna gave a little squeak of surprise. There were figures in the dark… and they were taller than the average adult was long. They wavered on three spindly legs and their forelegs and arms rose almost like the branches of a Reaching Frondeur. It was everything Chundra Khelm had ever claimed for his Distorts—and in the dark, it promised more detail to anyone who would come closer.

Viki read the words that glowed beneath the figures, and smiled to herself. “Hot stuff, huh?” she said to her sister.

“Yeah—I never imagined—” Then she read the description, too. “Oh, more crapping fakes.”

“Not a fake,” said Jirlib, “an admitted reconstruction.” But she could hear the disappointment in his voice. They walked slowly down the darkened hall, peering at ambiguous glimmers. And for a few minutes, the shapes were a tantalizing mystery that floated just beyond their grasp. There were all fifty of the racial types that Khelm described. But these were crude models, probably from some masquerade supplier. Jirlib seemed to wilt as he walked from display to display, and read the writeup under each. The descriptions were expansive: “The elder races that preceded ours… the creatures who haunted the Arachnans of ancient times… Darkest deepnesses may still contain their spawn, waiting to take back their world.” This last sign was beside a reconstruction that looked a lot like a monster tarant, poised to bite off the viewer’s head. It was all tripe, and even Viki’s little brother and sister would have known it. Chundra Khelm admitted that his “lost site” was beneath foram strata. If the Distorts were anything, they had been extinct atleast fifty million years—extinct millions of years before even the earliest proto-Arachnan ever lived.

“I think they’re just making fun of it, Jirl,” said Viki. For once she didn’t tease about it. She didn’t like it when outsiders mocked her family, even unknowingly.

Jirlib shrugged agreement. “Yeah, you’re right. The farther we walk, the funnier they get. Ha. Ha.” He stopped by the last display. “They even admit it! Here’s the last description: ‘If you have reached here, you understand how foolish are the claims of Chundra Khelm. But what are the Distorts then? Fakery from a conveniently misplaced digging site? Or some rare natural feature of metamorphic rock? You be the judge…’” His voice trailed off as his attention shifted to the brightly lit pile of rocks in the center of the room, hidden from earlier view by a partition.

Jirlib did a rolling hop, bounding to the bright-lit exhibit. He was practically jittering with excitement as he peered down into the pile. Each rock was separately displayed. Each rock was clearly visible in all the colors of the sunlight. They looked like nothing more than unpolished marble. Jirlib sighed, but in awe. “These are real Distorts, the best that anyone besides Chundra Khelm has ever found.”

If they had been polished, some of the rocks would have been kind of pretty. There were swirls that were more the color of elemental carbon than marble. If you used your imagination, they looked a little bit like regular shapes that had been stretched and twisted. They still didn’t look like anything that had ever been alive. On the far side of the pile was one rock that had been carefully sliced into tenth-inch sheets, so thin that the sunlight glowed right through. The stack of one hundred slices was mounted on a steel frame, with a gap between each slice. If you got really close and moved your head up and down, you had sort of a three-dimensional view of how the pattern was spread through the rock. There was a glittering swirl of diamond dust, almost like forams, but all smudged out. And around the diamond, a sort of webbery of dark-filled cracks. It was beautiful. Jirlib just stood there, his head pressed closed to the steel frame, tilting back and forth to see the light through all the slices. “This was alive once. I know it, I know it,” he said. “A million times bigger than any foram, but based on the same principles. If we could just see what it was like before it got all smeared apart.” It was the old, Khelmic refrain—but this thingwas real. Even Gokna seemed to be entranced by it; it was going to be a little while before Viki got a closer look. She walked slowly around the central pile, looked at some of the microscopic views, read the rest of the explanations. Leave aside the laughs, the junk statues—this was supposed to be the best example of Distorts around. In a way, that should discourage poor Jirlib as much as anything. Even if these had once been living things, there was certainly no evidence of intelligence. If the Distorts were what Jirlib really wanted, their creations should have been awesome. So where were their machines, their cities?

Sigh. Viki quietly moved away from Gokna and Jirlib. She was in plain sight behind them, but they were so caught by the translucent distort that neither seemed to notice her. Maybe she could sneak into the next hall, the videomancy thing. Then she saw Brent.He was not distracted by the exhibit. Her brother had hunkered down behind a table in one of the darkest corners of the room—and right next to the exit she was heading for. She might not have noticed him except that his eye surfaces gleamed in the extreme-colorlamps. From where he sat, Brent could lurk on both entrances and still see everything they were doing at the central tables.

Viki gave him a wave that was also a grin and drifted toward the exit. Brent didn’t move or call her back. Maybe he was in an ambush mood, or just daydreaming about his buildertoys. As long as she stayed in sight, maybe he wouldn’t squawk. She moved through the high-arched exit, into the videomancy hall.

The exhibit began with paintings and mosaics, generations old. The idea behind videomancy went back long before modern times, to the superstition that if you could only picture your enemies perfectly, you would have power over them. The notion had inspired a lot of art, the invention of new dyes and mixing formulas. Even now, the best pictures were only a shadow of what the Spider eye could see. Modern videomancy claimed that science could produce the perfect picture, and the ancient dreams would be realized. Daddy thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Viki walked between tall racks of glowing video tubes. A hundred still landscapes, fuzzy and blurred… but the most advanced tubes showed colors you never saw except in extreme lamps and sunlight. Every year, the video tubes got better. People were talking about picture radio even. That idea fascinated Little Victory—forget the mind-control quackery.

From somewhere beyond the far end of the hall there were voices, frolicsome jabber that sounded like Rhapsa and Little Hrunk. Viki froze in startlement. A few seconds passed… and two babies came bounding through the far entrance. Viki remembered Jirlib’s sarcastic prediction that Rhapsa and Hrunk would show up, too. For an instant she thought he’d been right. But no, two strangers followed them into the hall, and the children were younger than her little sister and brother.

Viki squeaked something excited and raced down the hall toward the children. The adults—the parents?—froze for an instant, then swept up their children and turned in retreat.

“Wait! Wait, please! I just want to talk.” Viki forced her legs down to a casual walking gait and lifted her hands in a friendly smile. Behind her, Viki could see that Gokna and Jirlib had left the Distort display, and were staring after her with expressions of stark surprise.

The parents stopped, came slowly back. Both Gokna and Viki were clearly out-of-phase. That seemed to encourage the strangers more than anything.

They talked for a few minutes, politely formal. Trenchet Suabisme was a planner at New World Construction; her husband was a surveyor there. “Today seemed like a good day to come to the museum, what with most of the day-off people up in the mountains playing in the snow. Was that your plan, too?”

“Oh, yes,” said Gokna—and for her and Jirlib maybe that was so. “But we are so glad to meet you, a-and your children. What are their names?” It was so weird to meet strangers who seemed more familiar than anyone but family. Trenchet and Alendon seemed to feel it too. Their children squirmed around loudly in their arms, refusing to retreat to Alendon’s back. After a few minutes, their parents set them back on the floor. The babies took two big hops each and ended up in the arms of Gokna and Viki. They scrambled around, chattering nonsense, their near sighted baby eyes turning this way and that with excited curiosity. The one climbing all over Viki—Alequere, she was—couldn’t be much over two years old. Somehow, neither Rhapsa nor Little Hrunk had ever seemed so cute. Of course, whenthey had been two, Viki had been only seven and still out to get all the attention she could for herself. These children were nothing like the surly oophases they had met before now.

The most embarrassing thing was the adults’ reaction when they learned exactly who Viki and her siblings were. Trenchet Suabisme was silent for a shocked second, “I-I guess we should have known. Who else could you be?… You know, when I was in my teens, I used to listen to your radio program. You seemed so awfully young, the only Outies I had ever heard. I really liked your show.”

“Yeah,” said Alendon. He smiled as Alequere wormed her way into the pocket on the side of Viki’s jacket. “Knowing about you made it possible for me and Trenchet to think about having our own children. It’s been hard; we lost our first baby welts. But once they get eyes, they’re cute as can be.”

The baby made happy squeaking noises as it scrambled around in Viki’s jacket. Her head finally emerged, waving eating hands. Viki stretched back to tickle the little hands. It made Viki proud to know that some had listened and gotten Daddy’s message, but—“It’s sad you still have to avoid the crowds. I wish there were more like you and your children.”

Surprisingly, Trenchet chuckled. “Times are changing. More and more, people expect to be awake right through the Dark; they’re beginning to see that some rules have to change. We’ll need grown children around to help finish the construction. We know two other couples in New World who are trying to have children out-of-phase.” She patted her husband’s shoulders. “We won’t be alone forever.”

The enthusiasm flowed across to Viki. Alequere and the other cobblie—Birbop?—were as nice as Rhapsa and Little Hrunk, but they weredifferent, too. Now finally they might know lots of other children. For Viki it was like opening a window, and seeing all the sunlight’s colors.

They walked slowly down the videomancy hall, Gokna and Trenchet Suabisme discussing various possibilities. Gokna was all for having the house on the hill turned into a meeting place for oophase families. Somehow, Viki suspected that would not fly with either Dad or the General, though for different reasons. But overall… something could be worked out; it made strategic sense. Viki followed the others, not paying much attention. She was having a very interesting time jiggling little Alequere. Playing with the cobblie was far more fun than seeing the snow could have been.

Then behind all the chatting, she heard the distant ticking of many feet on marble. Four people? Five? They’d be coming through the same doorway that Viki had, just a few minutes before. Whoever it was would have an interesting surprise—the sight of six oophases, from babies to near-adults.

Four of the newcomers were current-generation adults, big as any of Mother’s security people. They didn’t pause or even act surprised when they saw all the children. Their clothes were the same nondescript commercial jackets that Viki was used to back in the house on the hill. The leader was a sharp, last-generation cobber with the look of a senior noncom. Viki should have felt relief; these must be the people Brent had seen following them. But she didn’t recognize them—

The leader held them all in her gaze, then gestured familiarly at Trenchet Suabisme. “We can take it from here. General Smith wants all the children back inside the security perimeter.”

“W-what? I don’t understand?” Suabisme lifted her hands in confusion.

The five strangers walked steadily forward, the leader nodding pleasantly. But her explanations were nonsense: “Two guards just aren’t enough for all the children. After you left, we got a tip there might be problems.” Two of the security types stepped smoothly between the children and the Suabisme adults. Viki felt herself pushed un-gently toward Jirlib and Gokna. Mother’s people had never behaved like this. “Sorry, this is an emergency—”

Several things happened at once, totally confused and nonsensical. Both Trenchet and Alendon were shouting, panic mixed with anger. The two biggest strangers were pushing them back from the children. One was reaching into his pannier.

“Hey, we’ve missed one!” Brent.

Very high up, something was moving. The videomancy exhibit consisted of towering racks of display tubes. With inexorable grace, the nearest came toppling down, its pictures flickering out in showers of sparks and the sound of crumpling metal. She had a glimpse of Brent sailing off the top, just ahead of the destruction.

The floor smashed up at her when the display rack hit. Everywhere was the bang of imploding video tubes, the buzz of uncontrolled high voltage. The rack had come down between her and the Suabismes—and right on top of two of the strangers. She had a glimpse of colored blood oozing across the marble. Two motionless forehands extended from under the rack; just beyond their grasp lay a snub-barreled shotgun.

Then time resumed. Viki was grabbed roughly round her midsection and hauled away from the wreckage. On the other side of her abductor, she could hear Gokna and Jirlib shouting. There was a dull crunch. Gokna shrieked and Jirlib went silent.

“Teamleader, what about—”

“Never mind! We bagged all six. Move it. Move it!”

As she was carried from the hall, Viki got one glance back. But the strangers were leaving their two dead pals—and she couldn’t see beyond the fallen rack to where the Suabismes would be.

TWENTY-NINE

It was an afternoon that Hrunkner Unnerby would never forget. In all the years he had known Victory Smith, it was the first time he’d seen her come close to losing control. Just past noon the frantic call came over the microwave communications link, Sherkaner Underhill breaking through all military priorities with word of the kidnappings. General Smith dumped Sherkaner from the line and pulled her staff into emergency session. Suddenly Hrunkner Unnerby went from being a projects director to something like… like a sergeant. Hrunkner got her tri-prop on the flight line. He and lower staff checked background security. He wasn’t going to let his General take chances. Emergencies like this were just the things that enemies like to create, and when you’re thinking that nothing matters but that emergency,then they strike at their true targets.

The tri-prop took less than two hours to make it from Lands Command to Princeton. But the aircraft was no flying command center; such things were beyond current budgets. So the General had two hours with only a low-speed wireless link. That was two hours away from the command and control hub at Lands Command or its near equal at Princeton. Two hours to listen to fragmentary reports and try to coordinate a response. Two hours for grief and anger and uncertainty to gnaw. It was midafternoon when they landed, then another half hour before they reached Hill House.

Their car had scarcely stopped when Sherkaner Underhill was pulling the doors open, urging them out. He caught Unnerby by the arm, and spoke around him to the General. “Thanks for bringing Hrunkner. I need you both.” And he walked them across the foyer, drawing them down to his den on the ground floor.

Over the years, Unnerby had observed Sherkaner in various tricky situations: talking his way into Lands Command in the middle of the Tiefer War, guiding an expedition right through the vacuum of the Deepest Dark, debating trads. Sherk didn’t always win, but he was always so full of surprise and imagination. Everything was a grand experiment and a wonderful adventure. Even when he failed, he saw how the failure would make for more interesting experiments. But today… today Sherkaner had met despair. He reached out to Smith, the tremor in his head and arms more pronounced than ever. “There has to be a way to find them. There has to be. I have computers, and the microwave link to Lands Command.” All the resources that had served him so well in the past. “I can get them back safely. I know I can.”

Smith was very still for a moment. Then she moved close to him, laid an arm across Sherk’s shoulders, caressing his fur. Her voice was soft and stern, almost like a soldier bracing another about lost comrades. “No, dear. You can only do so much.” Outside, the afternoon was moving into overcast. A thin whistle of wind came through the half-opened windows, and the ferns scraped back and forth on the quartz panes. A dark green gloom was all that filtered down through the clouds and the shrubbery.

The General stood with her head close to Sherkaner’s, the two just staring at each other. Unnerby could almost feel the fear and the shame echoing back and forth between the two. Then, abruptly, Sherkaner collapsed toward her, his arms wrapping her. The soft hiss of Sherkaner’s weeping joined the wind as the only sounds in the room. After a moment, Smith raised one of her back hands, gently motioning for Hrunkner to leave.

Unnerby nodded back at her. The deep carpet was littered with toys—Sherkaner’s and the children’s—but he was careful where he stepped and managed a silent exit.

The twilight quickly became night, as much a product of the gathering storm as the setting of the sun. Unnerby didn’t see much of the weather, since the house command post had only tiny, beetling windows. Smith showed up there almost half an hour after Unnerby. She acknowledged her subordinates’ attention, then slid onto the perch next to Hrunkner. He waggled hands at her questioningly. She shrugged. “Sherk will be okay, Sergeant. He’s up with his graduate students, doing what he can. Now where are we?”

Unnerby pushed a stack of interviews across the table toward her. “Captain Downing and his team are still here, if you want to talk to them yourself, but all of us”—all the staff that had come up from Lands Command—“think they’re clean. The children were just too clever.” The children had made fools of an efficient security setup. Of course, they had lived with the setup for a long time, knew Security’s habits, were friends of the team members. And till now, the external threat had been a matter of theory and occasional rumor. It all worked in the cobblies’ favor when they decided to go for a jaunt…. But that security team was a creation of General Victory Smith’s own staff. The team members were smart people, loyal people; they were hurting as much as Sherkaner Underhill.

Smith pushed the reports back at him. “Okay. Get Daram and his team back in the loop. Keep them busy. What’s new with the search reports?” She waved the other staffers close, and she herself became very busy.

The house command post had good maps, a real situation table. With the microwave link, it could double for the command center at Lands Command. Unfortunately, it had no special advantage for comm into Princeton. It would be several hours before that problem was cured. There was a steady stream of runners moving in and out of the room. Many were fresh from Lands Command, and not part of the day’s debacle. That was a good thing, their presence leavening the fatigued dispair that showed in the aspects of some. There were leads. There was progress… both heartening and ominous.

The chief of counter-Kindred operations showed up an hour later. Rachner Thract was very new to his job, a young cobber and a Tiefer immigrant. It was strange to see someone with such a combination in that post. He seemed bright enough, but more bookish than deadly. Maybe that was okay; God knew they needed people who really understood the Kindred. How could traditional values go so wrong? In the Great War, the Kindred had been minor schismatics within the Tiefer empire, and secret supporters of the Accord. But Victory Smith thought they would be the next great threat—or maybe she just followed her general suspicion of trads.

Thract laid his rain cape on the coatrack and undid the pannier he carried. He set the documents down in front of his boss. “The Kindred are up to their shoulders in this one, General.”

“Why am I not surprised?” said Smith. Unnerby knew how tired she must be, but she seemed fresh, almost the usual Victory Smith. Almost. She was as calm, as courteous as at any staff meeting. Her questions were as clever as always. But Unnerby saw a difference, a faint distraction. It didn’t come across as anxiety; it was more like the General’s mind was somewhere else, contemplating. “Nevertheless, Kindred involvement was only a low probability this morning. What has changed, Rachner?”

“Two interviews and two autopsies. The cobbers who were killed had been through plenty of physical training, and it doesn’t look like athletics; there were old nicks in their chitin, even a patched bullet hole.”

Victory shrugged. “It’s been clear this was a professional job. We know there are domestic threats, trad fringe groups. They might hire competent operators.”

“They might, but this was the Kindred, not the local trads.”

“There’s hard evidence?” asked Unnerby, relieved and a little ashamed by the feeling.

“Um.” Thract seemed to consider the questioner as much as the question. The cobber couldn’t quite decide where Unnerby—a civilian addressed as “Sergeant”—might fit in the chain of command.Get used to it,sonny. “The Kindred make a big thing of their religious roots; but before now, they’ve been careful about interfering with us domestically. Covert funding of local trad groups was about their limit. But… they blew it today. These were Kindred professionals. They went to great trouble to be untraceable, but they didn’t count on our forensic labs. Actually, it’s a test one of your husband’s students invented. See, the ratio of pollen types in the breathing passages of both corpses is foreign; I can even tell you which Kindred base they launched from. These two hadn’t been in-country for more than fifteen days.”

Smith nodded. “If it had been longer, the pollen would be gone?”

“Right, captured by their immune system and flushed, the techs say. But even so, we still would have figured most of this out. You see, the other side had a lot more bad luck today than we did. They left behind two living witnesses….” Thract hesitated, obviously remembering that this wasnot an ordinary ops meeting, that for Smith the usual definition of operational success might count as catastrophic failure.

The General didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, the couple. The ones who brought their children to the museum.”

“Yes, ma’am. And they are half the reason why this thing blew up in the enemy’s face. Colonel Underville”—the domestic ops chief—“has had people talking to them all afternoon; they are desperately anxious to help. You’ve already heard what she got from them right away, how one of your sons brought down an exhibit and killed two of the kidnappers.”

“And that all the children were taken alive.”

“Right. But Underville has learned more. We’re almost sure now…. The kidnappers intended to steal all your children. When they saw the Suabismes’ little ones, they assumed those were yours. There just aren’t that many oophases in the world, even now. They naturally assumed the Suabismes wereour security people.”

God in the good cold earth.Unnerby gazed out the narrow windows. There was a little more light than before, but now it was the actinic ultras of security lamps. The wind was steadily picking up, driving sparkling droplets across the windows, and bending the ferns back and forth. There was supposed to be a lightning storm tonight.

So the Kindred screwed up because they had too high an opinion of Accord security. Naturally, they assumed thatsomeone would be with the children.

“We got a lot from the two civilians, General: the story these fellows used when they walked in, some turns of phrase after things blew up… The kidnappers didn’t intend to leave any witnesses. The Suabismes are the luckiest people in Princeton tonight, even if they don’t see it that way. The two that your son killed were pushing the Suabismes away from the children. One of them had unholstered an automatic shotgun, and all its safeties were off. Colonel Underville figures the original mission was to grab all your children and leave no witnesses. In fact, dead civilians and lots of blood was fine with their scenario, since it would all be blamed on our trad factions.”

“In that case, why not leave a couple of dead children, too? That would also have made the getaway easier.” Victory’s question was calm, but it had a distanced quality about it.

“We don’t know, ma’am. But Colonel Underville thinks they’re still in-country, maybe even in Princeton.”

“Oh?” Skepticism seemed to war with hope. “I know Belga clamped down awfully fast—and the other side had its problems, too. Okay. This will be your first big in-country operation, Rachner, but I want it done arm-in-arm with Domestic Intelligence. And you’ll have to involve the city and commercial police.” The classic anonymity of Accord Intelligence was going to get badly bent in the next few days. “Try to be nice to the city and commercial people. We don’t have a state of war. They can cause the Crown a world of trouble.”

“Yes, ma’am. Colonel Underville and I are running patrols with the city police. When the phones are set up, we’ll have some kind of joint command post with them here at Hill House.”

“Very good…. I think you were ahead of me all the time, Rachner.”

Thract gave a little smile as he came to his feet. “We’ll get your cobblies back, Chief.”

Smith started to reply, then noticed two small heads peeping around the doorjamb. “I know you will, Rachner. Thank you.”

Thract stepped back from the table, and a brief stillness spread through the room. The two youngest of Underhill’s children—maybe all who were left alive—walked shyly into the room, followed by the head of their guard team and three troopers. Captain Downing carried a furled umbrella, but it was clear that Rhapsa and Little Hrunk had not taken advantage of it. Their jackets were soaked and drops of rain stood on their glassy black chitin.

Victory had no smile for the children. Her gaze took in their soaked clothes and the umbrella. “Were you running around?”

Rhapsa answered, more subdued than Hrunkner had ever heard the little hellion. “No, Mother. We were with Daddy, but now he is busy. We stayed right by Captain Downing, between him and the others….” She stopped, tilted her head shyly at her guard.

The young captain snapped to attention, but he had the terrible look of a soldier who has just seen combat and defeat. “Sorry, ma’am. I decided not to use the umbrella. I wanted to be able to see in all directions.”

“Quite right, Daram. And… it’s right that you brought them here.” She stopped, just staring at her children for a quiet second. Rhapsa and Little Hrunk were motionless, staring back. Then, as if some central switch had been tripped, the two swarmed across the room, their voices raised in a wordless keen. For a moment they were all arms and legs, scrambling up Smith, hugging her like a father. Now that the dam of their reserve was broken, their crying was loud—and the questions, too. Was there any news about Gokna and Viki and Jirlib and Brent? What would happen now? And they didn’t want to be by themselves.

After a few moments things settled down. Smith tilted her head at the children, and Unnerby wondered what was going through her mind. She still had two children. Whatever the bad luck or incompetence of this day, it was two other young children who were stolen instead of these. She raised a hand in Unnerby’s direction. “Hrunkner. I have a request. Find the Suabismes. Ask them… offer them my hospitality. If they would like to wait this out here at Hill House… I would be honored.”

They were high up, in some kind of vertical ventilator shaft.

“No, it’s not a ventilator shaft!” said Gokna. “Real ones have all sorts of extra piping and utility cabling.”

There was no rumble of ventilator fans, just the constant whistle of the wind from above. Viki concentrated on the view straight above her head. She could see a grilled window at the top, maybe fifty feet up. Daylight shone through, splashing this way and that down the metal walls of the shaft. Here at the bottom they were in twilight, but it was more than bright enough to see the sleep mats, the chemical toilet, the metal floor. Their prison got steadily warmer as the day progressed. Gokna was right. They’d done enough exploring back home to know how real utility cores looked. But what else could this be? “Look at all the patches.” She waved at the disks that were sloppily welded here and there on the walls. “Maybe this place was abandoned—no, maybe it’s still under construction!”

“Yeah,” said Jirlib. “All this work is fresh. They just tack-welded covers on the access holes, maybe an hour’s work.” Gokna nodded, not even trying to get the last word. So much had changed since this morning. Jirlib was no longer a distant, angry umpire to their disputes. He was under more pressure than ever before, and she knew how bitterly guilty he must feel. Along with Brent, he was the eldest—and he’d let this happen. But the pain didn’t show directly; Jirlib was more patient than ever before.

And when he spoke, his sisters listened. Even if you didn’t count that he was just about an adult, he was by far the smartest of all of them.

“In fact, I think I know exactly where we are.” He was interrupted by the babies, stirring in their perches on his back. Jirlib’s fur was just not deep enough to properly comfort, and he was already beginning to stink. Alequere and Birbop alternated between caterwauling demands for their parents and nerve-racking silence, when they pinched tight onto poor Jirlib’s back. It looked like they were returning to noise mode. Viki reached out, coaxing Alequere into her arms.

“Where is that?” asked Gokna, but with no trace of argument in her voice.

“See the attercop webs?” said Jirlib, pointing upward. They were fresh, tiny patches of silk that floated in the breeze by the grill. “Each type has its own pattern. The ones up there are local to the Princeton area, but they nest in the highest places. The top of Hill House is just barely high enough for them. So—I figure we’re still in town, and we’re so high up we must be visible for miles. We’re either in the hill district or in that new skyscraper at City Center.”

Alequere started crying again. Viki rocked her gently back and forth. It was the sort of thing that always cheered up Little Hrunk, but… A miracle! Alequere’s wailing quieted. Maybe she was just so beaten down that she couldn’t make healthy noise. But no, after a few seconds the baby waved a weak little smile at her and twisted around so that she could see everything. She was a good little cobblie! Viki rocked the baby a few more seconds before she spoke. “Okay. Maybe they just drove us around in circles—but City Center? We’ve heard a few aircraft, but where are the street noises?”

“They’re all around.” It was almost the first thing Brent had said since the kidnapping. Slow and dull, that was Brent. And he was the only one of all of them who had guessed what was happening this morning. He was the one who dropped away from the others and lurked in the dark. Brent was grown-up-sized—riding that exhibit down on top of the enemy could have crippled him. When they were dragged out through the museum’s freight entrance, Brent had been limp and silent. He hadn’t said anything during the drive that followed, just waved when Jirlib and Gokna asked him if he was okay.

In fact, it looked like he had cracked one foreleg and injured at least one other, but he wouldn’t let them look at the damage. Viki understood. Brent would feel just as ashamed as Jirlib—and even more useless. He had withdrawn into a sullen pile, and then—after the first hour in their present captivity—had begun to limp around and around, tapping and ticking at the metal. Every so often he would plunk himself down flat, like he was pretending to be dead—or was totally despairing. That was his posture just now.

“Can’t you hear them?” he said again. “Belly-listen.”

Viki hadn’t played that game in years. But she and the others imitated him, sprawling absolutely flat, with no grasping arch at all. It wasn’t very comfortable, and you couldn’t hold on to anything while you did it. Alequere hopped out of her arms. Birbop joined his sister. The two ticked from one of the older children to another, prodding at them. After a moment, the two started giggling.

“Sh, sh,” Viki said softly. That only made the giggling louder. How long had Viki been praying for spirit to return to these two? And now she wanted them just to be quiet for a bit. She shut them out of her mind and concentrated. Hunh. It wasn’t exactly sound, not for the ears in your head, anyway. But all along her underside she could feel it. There was a steady background hum… and other vibrations, that came and went. Ha! It was a ghost of the thrumming life you felt in the tips of your feet when you walked around downtown! And there! The unmistakable burring of heavy brakes making a fast stop.

Jirlib was chuckling. “I guess that settles that! They thought they were so clever with that closed cargo box, but now we know.”

Viki rose to a more comfortable position and exchanged looks with Gokna. Jirlib was smarter, but when it came to sneakiness he had never been in a class with his sisters. Gokna’s reply was mild, partly to be polite, partly because the appropriate tones would have sent the babies back into hiding. “Jirl, I don’t think they were really trying to hide things from us.”

Jirlib shifted his head back, almost his “brother knows best” gesture. Then he caught her tone. “Gokna, they could have gotten us here in a five-minute drive. Instead, we were on the the road for more than an hour. What—”

Viki said, “I think that may have been just to evade Mother’s security. These cobbers had several cars running around; they switched us twice, remember. Maybe they actually tried to get out of town, and saw that they couldn’t do it.” Viki waved at their quarters. “If they have any sense, they know we’ve seen way too much.” She tried to keep her voice light. Birbop and Alequere had wandered over to the still-sprawled Brent and were picking his pockets. “We could identify them, Jirlib. We also saw the driver and the lady down in the museum loading area.”

And she told him about the automatic shotgun she’d seen on the floor at the museum. An expression of horror flickered across Jirlib. “You don’t think they’re trads, just trying to embarrass Dad and the General?”

Both Gokna and Viki gestured no. Gokna said, “I think they’re soldiers, Jirl, no matter what they say.” In fact, there had been lies on top of lies. When the gang appeared at the videomancy exhibit, they’d claimed to be from Mother’s security. But by time they dumped the cobblies here, they were talking like trads: The children were a horrible example for decent folk. They weren’t to be harmed, but their parents would be revealed as the perverts that they were. That’s what they said, but both Gokna and Viki noticed their lack of fire. Most traditionalists on the radio positively fumed; the ones Viki and Gokna had met in person got all torn up just at the sight of oophase children. These kidnappers were cool; behind the rhetoric, it was clear that the children were just cargo. Viki had noticed only two honest emotions under their professionalism. The leader was truly angry about the two that Brent had squashed… and every so often, there was a hint of distant regret for the children themselves.

Viki saw Jirlib flinch as the implications hit home, but he remained silent. Two shrieks of laughter interrupted his grim introspection. Alequere and Birbop weren’t paying any attention to Gokna and Viki, or Jirlib. They had discovered the play twine that Brent kept hidden in his jacket. Alequere hopped back, drawing the twine out in a soaring arc. Birbop jumped to grab it, ran in a quick circle around Brent as if to trap him round the legs.

“Hey, Brent, I thought you had outgrown that stuff,” said Gokna, a forced cheeriness in her teasing.

Brent’s answer was slow and a little defensive. “I get bored when I’m away from my sticks ’n’ hubs. You can play with twine anywhere.” For what it was worth, Brent was an expert at making twine patterns. When he was younger, he’d often roll onto his back and use all his arms and legs—even his eating hands—to wrap ever more complicated patterns. It was the sort of silly, intricate hobby that Brent loved.

Birbop grabbed the tip of the rope from Alequere and raced ten or fifteen feet up the wall, nimbly taking advantage of every grasp point the way only the very young can. He wiggled the rope at his sister, daring her to try to drag him down. When she did so, he jerked it back and climbed upward another five feet. He was just like Rhapsa used to be, maybe even a bit more nimble.

“Not so high, Birbop, you’ll fall!”—and Viki was sounding just like Daddy now.

The walls stretched up and up above the baby. And at the top, fifty feet above them, was the tiny window. Behind herself, Viki saw Gokna start with surprise. “Are you thinking what I am?” Viki said.

“P-probably. When she was little, Rhapsa could have climbed to the top.” Their kidnappers weren’t as smart as they thought. Anyone who had looked after babies would know better. But both the male kidnappers were young, current-generation.

“But if he falls—”

If he fell, there would be no gymnet base web, not even a soft carpet. A two-year-old might weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. They loved to climb; it was as if they sensed that once they got big and heavy, they’d be stuck with climbing stairs and making only the most trivial jumps. Babies could fall a lot farther than grown-ups without serious injury, but long falls would still kill them. Two-year-olds didn’t know that. A simple suggestion would send Birbop off for the window at the top. The chances were good that he would make it….

Normally, Viki and Gokna would jump into any wild scheme, but this was someone else’s life…. The two stared at each other for a moment. “I—I don’t know, Viki.”

And if they did nothing? The babies would likely be killed along with the rest of them. There could be terrible consequences whatever they chose. Suddenly Viki was more frightened than she had ever been before; she walked across the floor to stand under the grinning Birbop. Her arms reached up as if with a life of their own, to coax the baby back down. She forced her arms down, forced her voice into a light, teasing tone. “Hi, Birbop! Do you think you can carry the twine all the way to that little window?”

Birbop tilted his head, turned his baby eyes upward. “Sure.” And he was off, scuttling back and forth from weld patch to pipefitting, upward and upward.I owe you, little one, even if you don’t know it.

On the ground, Alequere squawked outrage that Birbop should have all the attention. She jerked hard on the twine, leaving her brother dangling by three arms from a narrow ledge twenty feet up. Gokna scooped her off the floor and away from the twine, and handed her to Jirlib.

Viki tried to shake off the terror she felt; she watched the baby climb higher and higher. And if we can get to the window, then what? Throw out notes? But they had nothing to write with—and they didn’t know just where they were or where the wind might carry a note…. And suddenly she saw how one thing might solve two problems. “Brent, your jacket.” She jerked her hands, waving for Gokna to help him take it off.

“Yes!” Gokna was pulling at the sleeves and pants almost before Viki finished talking. Brent stared in surprise for a second, and then he got the idea and started helping. His jacket was almost as big as Jirlib’s, but without the slits down the back. The three of them stretched it flat between them and sidled this way and that, trying to track the lateral movements of the high-climbing Birbop. Maybe, even if he fell… It was the sort of thing that always worked in adventure stories. Somehow, standing here holding the jacket, it seemed absurd to imagine such success.

Alequere was still screeching, struggling to get out of Jirlib’s grasp. Birbop laughed at her. He was quite happy to be at the center of attention, doing something he normally would have gotten whacked for. Forty feet up. He was slowing. The foot- and handholds were scarce; he was beyond the main ventilator fixtures. A couple of times he almost lost the twine as it slipped from hand to hand. He gathered himself on an impossibly narrow ledge and leaped sidewise up the remaining three feet—and one of his hands snagged the window grille. An instant later, his body was silhouetted in the light.

With only two eyes, and those in front, babies almost had to turn around to see behind themselves. Now for the first time, Birbop looked down. His triumphant laughter choked as he saw just how far he had come, so far that even his baby instincts told him he was at risk. There were reasons parents didn’t let you climb as high as you wanted. Birbop’s arms and legs clamped reflexively to the grillework.

And they couldn’t persuade him that no one could come up to help him, and that he could get down by himself. Viki had never imagined that this would be a problem. On the occasions that Rhapsa or Little Hrunk had escaped to unholy heights, neither had any trouble getting back down.

Just when it seemed that Birbop was in a permanent state of paralysis, his sister stopped crying and began laughing at him. After that, it wasn’t hard to persuade him to thread the twine through the grillework and then use it as a kind of pulley to support his descent.

Most babies came on the idea themselves, sailing downward on play twine; maybe it went back to some animal memories. Birbop started down with five limbs wrapped securely around the descending strand and three others braking the ascending strand. But after he had descended a few feet and it became clear how smoothly the play twine worked, he was holding with just three arms—and then two. He bounced off the walls with his feet, flying downward like some pouncing tarant. Below him, Viki and the others hopped around in a vain effort to keep their makeshift net under him… and then he was down.

And they had a loop of play twine extending from the floor to the window grille and back. It glowed and twitched as it released stretch energy.

Gokna and Viki argued about which of them would do the next step. Viki won that one; she weighed under eighty pounds, the least of any of them. She pulled and swung on it while Brent and Gokna ripped the silk lining out of his jacket. The lining was dyed with red and ultra splotches. Better yet, it was constructed of folded layers; cutting it along the stitching gave them a banner that was light as smoke, but fifteen feet on a side. Surely someone would notice.

Gokna folded the lining down to a neat square and handed it to her. “The twine, you really think it’ll hold?”

“Sure.” Maybe. The stuff was slick and stretchy, like any good play twine—and what would happen when she stretched it all the way?

What Brent said comforted her more than any wishful thinking: “I think it will hold. I like to hang things in my designs. I took this from the mechanics lab.”

Viki took off her own jacket, grabbed the homemade flag in her eating hands, and started up. In her rear view, the others dwindled into an anxious little pattern around the “safety net.” Lot of good that would do if someone as big as her fell. She swayed out and in, bouncing step by step up the wall. Actually, it was easy. Even a full-grown adult wouldn’t have trouble climbing a vertical with two support ropes—as long as the ropes held. As much as she watched the twine and the wall, she watched the doorway down below. Funny how she hadn’t started worrying about interruptions until now. But success was so close. It would all be for nothing if one of the goons chose now to look in on them. Just a few more feet…

She slipped her forehands through the window grille, and hoisted herself close to the open air. There was no room to perch, and the grille bars were too close-set for even a baby to sneak through—but, ah, the view! They were at the top of one of the giant new buildings, at least thirty stories up. The sky had become a tumbling overcast, and the wind swept fiercely past the window. Her view downward was partly blocked by the shoulders of the building, but Princeton spread before her like some beautiful model. She had a straight view down one street, could see buses, automobiles, people. And if they looked in her direction… Viki unwrapped the jacket liner and poked it through the grille. The wind almost pulled it from her grasp. She caught hold more firmly, tearing the fabric with points of her hands. The stuff was so flimsy! Gently, carefully she pulled the ends back, tied them in four separate places. Now the wind spread the colored square out from the side of the building. The fabric snapped in the wind, sometimes rising to cover the window, sometimes falling against the stonework below her view.

One last look at freedom: Out where the land met the overcast, city hills disappeared in the murk. But Viki could see enough to orient herself. There was a hill, not quite so high as the others, but with a spiraling pattern of streets and buildings. Hill House! She could see all the way home!

Viki sailed down from the window, gleeful out of all proportion. They would win yet! She and the others pulled down the sparkling twine, hid it back in Brent’s jacket. They sat in the gathering dimness, wondering when their jailers would show up again, arguing about what to do when that happened. The afternoon got awfully dark and the rain started. Still, the sound of fabric snapping in the wind was a comfort.

Sometime after midnight, the storm tore the banner free and lost it in the darkness.

THIRTY

The Right of Petition to the Podmaster was a convenient tradition. It even had a basis in historical fact, though Tomas Nau was sure that centuries ago, in the middle of the Plague Times, the only petitions granted were matters of propaganda. In modern times, the manipulation of petitions had been Uncle Alan’s preferred way of maintaining popularity and undermining rival factions.

It was a clever tactic, as long as you avoided Alan’s mistake of allowing assassins as petitioners. In the twenty-four years since their arrival at OnOff, Tomas Nau had passed on about a dozen petitions. This one today was the first that had claimed “time is of the essence.”

Nau looked across the table at the five petitioners. Correction: representatives of Petitioners. They claimed one hundred backers, and on just 8Ksec notice. Nau smiled, waved them to their seats. “Pilot Manager Xin. You are senior, I believe. Please explain your Petition.”

“Yes, Podmaster.” Xin glanced at his girlfriend, Rita Liao. Both were Emergents from the home world, from families that had contributed Focused and Followers for more than three hundred years. Such were the backbone of the Emergent culture, and running them should have been easy. Alas, nothing was easy out here, twenty light-years from civilization. Xin was wordless for a second more. He stole a nervous glance at Kal Omo. Omo’s returning look was very cold, and Nau suddenly wished he’d taken time to be briefed by the podsergeant. With Brughel currently off-Watch, there would be no one to blame if he had to deny the Petition.

“As you know, Podmaster, many of us are working with the ground analysis. Many more have a general interest in the Spiders we watch—”

Nau gave him a gentle smile. “I know. You hang out at Benny’s and listen to the translations.”

“Yes, sir. Um. We very much like ‘The Children’s Hour,’ and some of the story translations. They help us with our analysis. And…” His eyes got a faraway look. “I don’t know. The Spiders have a whole world down there, even if they aren’t human. Compared to us, sometimes they seem more—“Real, Nau was sure he was going to say. “I mean, we’ve come to be fond of some of the Spider children.”

As planned.The live translations were heavily buffered now. They had never discovered precisely what caused the mindrot runaway—or even if it had been connected with the live show. Anne figured that the current risk was no more than that of their other operations. Nau reached to his right, gently touched Qiwi’s hand. She smiled back. The Spider children were important. This was something he might never have understood if not for Qiwi Lisolet. Qiwi had been so good for so much. Watching her, talking to her, deceiving her—there was so much to learn. Real children would be an impossible drain on L1’s resources, butsomething had to substitute. Qiwi and her schemes and her dreams had shown him the way. “We’re all fond of the cobblies, Pilot Manager. Your petition has something to do with the kidnapping?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been seventy Ksec since the abduction. The ‘Accord’ Spiders are using their best comm and intelligence gear more intensely than ever before. It’s not doingthem any good, but our zipheads are getting a lot from it. The Accord microwave links have been full of intercepted Kindred messages. Most of the Kindred encryption is algorithmic, not one-time pads. The Accord can’t break any of it, but the algorithms, are easy for us. For the last forty Ksec, we—I—have been using our translators and analysts. I think I know where the children are being held. Five analysts give near certainty that—”

“Five analysts, three translators, and part of the snoop array over on theInvisible Hand. “ Reynolt’s voice was loud and implacable, overriding Xin’s. “In addition, Manager Xin has been using almost a third of the support hardware.”

Omo came on like a chorus, perhaps the first time Nau had ever seen Reynolt and Security in such concert: “And furthermore, it couldn’t happen unless the Pilot Manager and a few other privileged managers were using emergency resource codes.” Sergeant Omo’s glance flickered across the petitioners. They shrank before his gaze, the Emergents more fearfully than Qeng Ho.Abuse of the community’s resources. It was the primal sin. Nau smiled to himself. Brughel would have been still scarier, but Omo would do.

Nau raised his hand, and silence spread across the room. “I understand, Podsergeant. I want a report from you and Director Reynolt as to any lasting damage that might result from this…” He wouldn’t actually use the words. “…activity.” He was silent for a moment more, schooling his expression as if to hide the conflict of a just man trying to reconcile the desires of individuals with the long-term needs of the community. He felt Qiwi squeeze his hand. “Pilot Manager, you understand that we can’t reveal ourselves?”

Xin looked completely cowed. “Yes, Podmaster.”

“You of all people should know how thin we are stretched here. After the fighting, we were short on Focus and staff. After the rotting runaway of a few Watches back, we are even more lacking in Focus. We have no capital equipment, few weapons, and scarcely even an in-system transport capability. Wemight be able to intimidate a Spider faction or ally ourselves with one, but the risks would be enormous. Our surest course is the one we have pursued ever since the Diem Massacre: We must wait and lurk. We are just a few years short of this world’s Information Age. Eventually, we will establish human automation in the Spiders’ networks. Eventually they will have a civilization that can restore our ships, and one that we can safely manage. Till then… till then, we dare not take any direct action.”

Nau’s gaze took in each of the petitioners: Xin, Liao, Fong. Trinli sat a little apart, as if to show that he had tried to dissuade the others. Ezr Vinh was off-Watch, else he would surely be here. They were all troublemakers by Ritser Brughel’s measure. Every Watch, their tiny pod here at L1 drifted further and further from the norms of an Emergent community. Part of it was their desperate circumstances, part of it was Qeng Ho assimilation. Even in defeat, the Peddler attitudes were corrosive. Yes, by civilized standards, these people were troublemakers—but they were also the people who, along with Qiwi, made the mission possible.

For a moment no one spoke. Tears leaked silently from Rita Liao’s eyes. Hammerfest’s microscopic gravity wasn’t enough to tug them down her cheeks. Jau Xin’s head bowed in submission. “I understand, Podmaster. We withdraw the petition.”

Nau gave a gracious nod. There would be no punishment, and an important point had been made.

Then Qiwi patted his hand. She was grinning! “So why not make this a test for what we will do later? True, we can’t reveal ourselves, but look at what Jau has done. For the first time, we’re really using the Spiders’ own intelligence system. Their automation may be twenty years short of an Information Age, but they are pushing computers even harder than in Earth’s Dawn Age. Eventually, Anne’s translators will be inserting information back into their systems, why not start now? Each year we should do a little more meddling and a little more experimentation.”

Hope shone in Xin’s eyes, but his words were still in retreat. “But are they that far along? These creatures just launched their first satellite last year. They don’t have pervasive localizer nets—or any localizer nets at all. Except for that pitiful link from Princeton to Lands Command, they don’t even have a computer net. How can we get information back into their system?”

Yes, how?

But Qiwi was still smiling. It made her look so young, almost like the first years that he’d had her. “You said that the Accord has intercepted Kindred comm related to the kidnapping?”

“Sure. That’s howwe know what’s going on. But Accord Intelligence can’t break the Kindred crypto.”

“Are they trying to break the intercepts?”

“Yes. They have several of their largest computers—big as houses—flailing away at both ends of the Princeton/Lands Command microwave link. It would take them millions of years to come on the right decryption key… Oh.” Xin’s eyes got even wider. “Can we do that without them twigging?”

Nau got the point at almost the same moment. He asked the air: “Background: How are they generating test keys?”

After a second, a voice replied, “A pseudo-random walk, modified by what their mathematicians know about the Kindred’s algorithms.”

Qiwi was reading something in her huds. “Apparently the Accord is experimenting with distributed computation across the link. That’s frivolous, since there are less than ten computers on their entire net. But we have a dozen snoopersats that pass across the lines of sight of their microwavelink. It would be easy to mung up what’s going between their relays—that’s how we were going to do our first inserts, anyway. In this case, we’ll just make small changes when they are sending trial keys. It might be as few as a hundred bits, even counting the framing.”

Reynolt: “Okay. Even if they investigate later, it would be a plausible glitch. Do it for more than one key, and I say it’s too dangerous.”

“One key would be enough, if it’s for the right session.”

Qiwi looked at Nau. “Tomas, it could work. It’s low-risk, and we should be experimenting with active measures anyway. You know the Spiders are more and more interested in space activities. We may be forced to meddle a lot, fairly soon.” She patted his shoulder, cajoling more publicly than ever before. No matter how cheerful she seemed, Qiwi had her own emotional stake in this.

But she’s right. This could be the ideal first sending for Anne’s zip-heads. Time to be grandly generous. Nau smiled back. “Very well, ladies and gentlemen. You have convinced me. Anne, arrange to reveal one key. I think Manager Xin can show you the critical session. Give this operation first transient priority for the next forty Ksec—and retroactively for the last forty.” So Xin and Liao and the others were officially off the hook.

They didn’t cheer, but Nau sensed enthusiasm and abject gratitude as the petitioners stood and floated out of the room.

Qiwi started to follow them, then turned quickly back and kissed Nau on the forehead. “Thanks, Tomas.” And then she was gone with the others.

He turned to the only remaining visitor, Kal Omo. “Keep an eye on them, Sergeant. I’m afraid things will be more complicated from now on.”

During the Great War, there had been times when Hrunkner Unnerby had gone without sleep for days at a time, under fire all the while. This single night was worse. God only knew how bad it was for the General and Sherkaner. Once the phone lines were in place, Unnerby spent most of his time in the joint command post, just down the hall from the Accord-secure room. He worked with the local cops and Underville’s comm team, trying to track the rumors around town. The General had been in and out, the picture of composed intensity. But Unnerby could tell that his old boss was over the edge. She was managing too much, involving herself at low levels and high. Hell, she’d been gone now for three hours, off with one of the field teams.

Once, he went out to check on Underhill. Sherk was holed up in the signals lab, right below the top of the hill. Guilt lay like a blight on him, dimming the happy spirit of genius he used to bring to every problem. But the cobber was trying, substituting obsession for buoyant enthusiasm. He was pounding away with his computers, coopting everything he could. Whatever he was doing, it looked like nonsense to Unnerby.

“It’s math, not engineering, Hrunk.”

“Yeah, number theory.” This from the scruffy-looking postdoc whose lab this was. “We’re listening for…” He leaned forward, apparently lost in the mysteries of his own programming. “We’re trying to break the crypto intercepts.”

Apparently he was talking about the signal fragments that had been detected coming out of the Princeton area just after the abduction. Unnerby said, “But we don’t even know if that’s from the kidnappers.” And if I werethe Kindred, I’d be using one-time code words, not some keyed encryption.

Jaybert what’s-his-name just shrugged and continued with his work. Sherkaner didn’t say anything either, but his aspect was desolate. This was the best he could do.

So Unnerby had fled back to the joint command post, where there was at least the illusion of progress.

Smith was back about an hour after sunrise. She looked through the negative reports quickly, a nervous edge to her movements. “I left Belga downtown with the local cops. Damnation, her comm isn’t much better than the locals’.”

Unnerby rubbed his eyes, trying vainly to put a polish there that only a good sleep could accomplish. “I fear Colonel Underville doesn’t really like all this fancy equipment.” In any other generation, Belga would have been fine. In this one—well, Belga Underville was not the only person having trouble with the grand new era.

Victory Smith slid down next to her old sergeant. “But she has kept the press off our backs. What word from Rachner?”

“He’s down in the Accord-secure center.” In fact, the young major did not confide in Unnerby.

“He’s so sure this is a pure Kindred operation. I don’t know. They are in on it… but, you know the museum clerk is a trad? And the cobber working the museum’s loading dock has disappeared. Belga’s discovered he’s a traditionalist, too. I think the local trads are in this up to their shoulders.” Her voice was mild, almost contemplative. Later, much too much later, Hrunkner would remember back: The General’s voice was mild, but she sat with every limb tensed.

Unfortunately, Hrunkner Unnerby was lost in his own world. All night long he had watched the reports, and stared out into the windy dark. All night long he had prayed to the coldest depths of the earth, prayed for Little Victory, Gokna, Brent, and Jirlib. He spoke sadly, almost to himself. “I watched them grow into real people, cobblies that anyone could love. They do have souls.”

“What do you mean?” The sharpness in Victory’s voice didn’t penetrate his fatigue. He had years afterward to think back on this conversation, this single moment, to imagine the ways he might have avoided disaster. But the present did not feel the desperate gaze of the future, and he blundered on: “It’s not their fault that they were brought into the world out-of-phase.”

“It’s not their fault my slippery modern ideals have killed them?” Smith’s voice was a cutting hiss, something that even sorrow and fatigue could not block from Unnerby’s attention. He saw that his General was trembling.

“No, I—” But it was finally, irrevocably too late.

Smith was on her feet. She flicked a single long arm across his head, whiplike. “Get out!”

Unnerby staggered back. His right side vision was a coruscating ray of plaid agony. In all other directions, he saw officers and noncoms caught with aspects of shocked surprise.

Smith advanced on him. “Trad! Traitor!” Her hands jabbed with each word, killing blows just barely restrained. “For years you’ve pretended to be a friend, but always sneering and hating us. Enough!” She stopped her relentless approach, and brought her arms back to her sides. And Hrunkner knew she had capped her rage, and what she said now was cold and calm and considered… and it hurt even more than the wound across his eyes. “Take your moral baggage and go. Now.”

Her aspect was something he had seen once or twice before, during the Great War, when their backs were against the wall and still she had not yielded. There would be no argument, no relenting. Unnerby lowered his head, choked on words he was desperate to say.I’m sorry. I meant noharm. I love your children. But it was too late for words to change anything. Hrunkner turned, walked quickly past the shocked and silent staff and out the door.

When Rachner Thract heard that Smith was back in the building, he hightailed it down to the joint command post. That’s where he should have been during the night,except I’ll be damned if I let my crypto get exposedto the domestic branch and the local police. The separate operation had worked, thank goodness. He had hard information for the chief.

He ran into Hrunkner Unnerby going the other way. The old sergeant had lost his usual martinet bearing. He walked unsteadily down the hallway, and there was a long, milky welt across the right side of his head.

He waved at the sergeant. “You okay?” But Unnerby walked on past him, ignoring Rachner as a beheaded osprech might ignore a farmer. He almost turned to follow the cobber, then remembered his own urgency and continued into the joint command post.

The place was silent as a deepness… or a graveyard. Clerks and analysts sat motionless. As Rachner walked across the room toward General Smith, the rattle of work resumed, sounding strangely self-conscious.

Smith was paging through one of the operation logs, just a little too fast to be getting much out of it. She waved him to the perch beside her. “Underville sees evidence of local involvement, but we still don’t have anything solid.” Her tone was casual, belying or ignoring the astounded silence of a moment before. “Have you got anything new? Any reaction from our Kindred ‘friends’?”

“Lots of reaction, Chief. Even the superficial stuff is intriguing. About an hour after the kidnap story broke, the Kindred turned up the volume on their propaganda—especially the stuff aimed at the poorer nation-states. The spew is ‘murder after Dark’ fearmongering, but more intense than usual. They’re saying that the kidnapping is the desperate act of decent people, people who realize that non-trad elements have taken over the Accord….”

Everything was getting quiet again. Victory Smith spoke, a little sharply. “Yes, I know what they say. This is how I’d expect them to react to the kidnappings.”

Maybe he should have begun with the big news. “Yes, ma’am, though they did respond a bit too quickly. Our usual sources hadn’t heard about this beforehand, but now—well, it’s beginning to look like the kidnappings are just a symptom that the Extreme Measures faction has achieved decisive control within the Kindred. In fact, at least five of the Deepest were executed yesterday, ‘moderates’ like Klingtram and Sangst, and—alas—incompetents like Droobi. What’s left is clever and even more risk-attracted than before—”

Smith leaned back, startled. “I—see.”

“We haven’t known for more than half an hour, ma’am. I’ve got all the area analysts on it. We see no related military developments.”

For the first time, he seemed to have her full attention. “That makes sense. We’re years away from the point where a war would benefit them.”

“Right, Chief. Not war, not now. The Kindred grand strategy must still be to wear down the developed world as far as possible before the Dark, and then fight whoever is still awake…. Ma’am, we also have less certain information.” Rumors, except that one of his deep-cover agents had died to get them out. “It looks like Pedure is now the Kindred’s head of external ops. You remember Pedure. We thought she was a low-level operator. Apparently she is smarter and more bloody-handed than we guessed. She’s probably responsible for this coup. She may be first among the new Deepest. In any case, she’s convinced them that you and, more particularly, Sherkaner Underhill are the key to the Accord’s strategic successes. Assassinating you would be very difficult, and you’ve protected your husband almost as well. Kidnapping your children opens a—”

The General’s hands tapped a staccato on the situation table. “Keep talking, Major.”

Pretend we’re talking about somebody else’s cobblies. “Chief, Sherkaner Underhill has talked often enough about his feelings on the radio, how much he values each child. What I’m getting now”—from the agent who had blown cover to get the word out—“is that Pedure sees almost no downside to grabbing your children, and any number of advantages. At best, she hoped to get all of your children out of the Accord, and then quietly play with you and your husband over a period of—years, perhaps. She figures that you could not continue in your present job with that sort of side conflict.”

Smith began, “If they were killed one by one, pieces of them sent back to us…” Her voice faded. “You’re right about Pedure. She would understand how things work with Sherkaner and me. Okay, I want you and Belga to—”

One of the desk phones chattered, an in-building direct line. Victory Smith flicked a pair of long arms across the table and grabbed the handset. “Smith.”

She listened for a moment, then whistled softly. “Theywhat ? But… Okay, Sherkaner, I believe you. Yes, Jaybert was right to pass it on to Underville.”

She rang off, and said to Thract, “Sherkaner’s found the key. He’s deciphered last night’s radio intercepts. It looks like the cobblies are being held in the Plaza Spar, downtown.”

Now the phone by Thract went off. He stabbed the Public On hole, and said, “Thract here.”

Belga Underville’s voice sounded faint and off-mike: “They have? Well, shut them up!” Then louder: “Listen, Thract? I’ve got my hands full down here. Now I get a call from your techie-freaks saying the victims are being held on the top floor of the Plaza Spar. Are you cobbers for real?”

Thract: “They’re not my techs. It’s important intelligence, Colonel, wherever it came from.”

“Damn, I already had a real lead. The city police spotted a silk banner snagged on the Bank of Princeton tower.” That was about half a mile from the Plaza Spar. “It was the jacket fabric that Downing described to us.”

Smith leaned close to the mike, and said, “Belga, was there anything attached? A note?”

There was an instant’s hesitation, and Thract could imagine Belga Underville getting her temper under control. Belga didn’t mind complaining to her fellows about all the “bloody stupid technology,” but not with Smith on the line.

“No, Chief. It was pretty well shredded. Look. The techs could be right about the Plaza Spar, but that’s a busy place. I’ll send a team to the lower floors, pretending to be customers. But—”

“Good. No alarms; get in close.”

“Chief, I think the tower where we found the banner is a better bet. It’s mostly vacant, and—”

“Fine. Go after both.”

“Yes, ma’am. The problem is the city police. They went off on their own, sirens, everything.”

Last night, Victory Smith had lectured Thract on the power of local police. But that power was economic, and political. Just now she said, “They have? Well, shut them up! I’ll take responsibility.”

She waved to Thract. “We’re going downtown.”

THIRTY-ONE

Shynkrette paced about her “command post.” Talk about luck. This mission had been designed as a hundred-day lurk-and-pounce. Instead, they’d bagged their targets less than ten days after insertion. The whole op had been an incredible combination of happenstance and screwup. So what else was new? Promotions came from pulling success out of real-world situations, and Shynkrette had survived worse than this. Barker and Fremm getting squashed had been bad luck and inattention. Maybe the worst mistake had been leaving the witnesses—at least it was the worst mistake that could be laid on her own back. On the other hand they had six children, at least four of them the targets. The getaway from the museum had been smooth, but the airport pickup fell through. The Accord’s local security was just a little too quick—maybe again because of those surviving witnesses.

This office space ringed the Plaza Spar, twenty-five stories up. It gave an excellent view of city activity, except directly below. In one sense, they were completely trapped here—who had ever hidden by sticking themselves up in the sky? In another sense—Shynkrette paused behind her team sergeant. “What does Trivelle say, Denni?”

The sergeant lifted the phone from his head. “Ground-floor lobby is about average busy. He has some business visitors. An old coot and some last-generation cobbers. They want to rent office space.”

“Okay. They can look at the third-floor suites. If they want to look at anything else, they can come back tomorrow.” Tomorrow, Deep willing, Shynkrette and her team would be long gone. They would have been gone last night, if not for the storm. Kindred Special Operations could do things with helicopters that the Accord military had never imagined…. If good luck and competence held another day or two, her team would be back home with their prize. The Kindred book of doctrine had always been big on assassinations and decapitating strikes. With this op, the Honored Pedure was writing a new and experimental chapter. Deep, what Pedure would do with those six children. Shynkrette’s mind shied away from the thought. She had been in Pedure’s inner circle ever since the Great War, and her fortunes had risen accordingly. But she much preferred doing the Honored’s fieldwork to being with her in the Kindred torture chambers. Things could get so easily… turned around… in the chambers. And death could be so slow there.

Shynkrette moved from quarter to quarter, scanning the streets with a reflecting magnifier…. Damn, a police convoy, emergency lights blinking. She recognized the special gear on those trucks. This was the police “heavy weapons” team. Their great success lay in scaring criminals into surrender. The lights—and the sirens she would surely start hearing in a minute—were all part of the intimidation. In this case, the police had made a very large mistake. Shynkrette was already running back around the ring of offices, pulling her little shotgun off her back as she ran.

“Team Sergeant! We’re going upstairs.”

Denni raised his head in surprise. “Trivelle says he hears sirens, but they don’t seem to be coming this way.”

A coincidence? Maybe the police had someone else they wanted to wave their guns at? Shynkrette balanced in a rare moment of indecision. Denni held up a hand, continued, “But he says he thinks three of the oldsters have left the sales tour, maybe gone to the washroom.”

So much for indecision; Shynkrette waved the sergeant to his feet. “Tell Trivelle to melt away,” if he can. “We’re into Alt Five.” There was always an Alternative Plan; that was a grim joke in Special Operations. They had had some warning. Very likely they could get out of the building, melt into the sea of civilians. Corporal Trivelle had less of a chance, but he knew so little it wouldn’t matter. The mission would not end up an embarrassment. If they took care of one last piece of business, it might even be counted a partial success.

As they raced up the central stairs, Denni was pulling down his own shotgun and combat knife. Success in Alt 5 meant taking a few minutes for a little detour, long enough to kill the children. Long enough so it would look really messy. Pedure apparently thought that would screw someone’s head on the Accord side. It sounded nuts to Shynkrette, but she didn’t know all the facts. It didn’t matter. At the end of the war, she had helped massacre a sleeping deepness. Nothing could be uglier than that, but the stolen hoards had financed the Kindred’s resurgence.

Hell, she was probably doing these children a favor; now they would miss their date with Honored Pedure.

Through most of the morning, Brent had lain flat on the metal floor. He looked as discouraged as Viki and Gokna felt. Jirlib at least had his hands full trying to comfort the two babies. The little ones were totally and loudly unhappy now, and wouldn’t have anything to do with the sisters. The last time anyone had been fed was the previous afternoon.

There wasn’t even much left to conspire about. By morning twilight, it had been obvious that their rescue flag was gone. A second attempt tore loose in less than thirty minutes. After that, Gokna and Viki spent three hours wrapping the play twine in intricate patterns through the pipe stubs above the room’s only entrance. Brent had been a real help with that—he was so good with knots and patterns. If anyone unfriendly came through that door, they would get a mawful of unpleasantness. But if their visitors were armed, how could it be enough? At that question, Brent had retreated from their arguments, gone to splay himself out on the cold floor.

Above them, a narrow square of sunlight crept foot by foot across the high walls of their prison. It must be almost noon. “I hear sirens,” Brent said abruptly, after an hour of silent sitting. “Lie down close and listen.”

Gokna and Viki did. Jirlib shushed the babies, for what that was worth.

“Yeah, I hear them.”

“Those arepolice sirens, Viki. Feel thethump, thump ?”

Gokna jumped up, was already racing for the doorway.

Viki stayed on the floor a moment longer. “Bequiet, Gokna!”

And even the babies were quiet. There were other sounds: the heavy thrum of fans somewhere lower in the building, the street noise that they had heard before… but now the staccato sound of many feet, running up steps.

“That’s close,” said Brent.

“Th-they’re coming for us.”

“Yes.” Brent paused, in his usual dull way. “And I hear others coming, quieter or farther away.”

It didn’t matter. Viki ran to the doorway, hoisted herself up after Gokna. What they planned was pretty pitiful, but the worst and the best of it was that they didn’t have any other choice. Earlier, Jirlib had argued that he was bigger, that he should swing down from above. Yeah, but he was only one target, and someone had to keep the babies out of the line of fire. So now Gokna and Viki stood against the wall, five feet above the doorway on either side, bracing themselves against Brent’s clever ropework.

Brent rose, ran to the right side of the doorway. Jirlib stood well off to the side. He held the children tight in his arms, and didn’t try to quiet them anymore. But now, suddenly, they were quiet. Maybe they understood. Maybe it was something instinctive.

Through the wall, Viki could feel the running steps now. Two people. One said something low to the other. She couldn’t hear the words but she recognized the leader of the kidnappers. A key rattled in the lock. On the floor to her left, Jirlib gently set the babies down behind him. They stayed quiet, totally still—and Jirlib turned back to the door, ready to pounce. Viki and Gokna crouched lower against the wall. They had twisted all the leverage they dared out of the twine. A final look passed between the two. They had gotten the others into this mess. They had risked the life of an innocent bystander to try to get out. Now it was time for payback.

The door slid open, metal slipping across metal. Brent tensed for a leap. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said, his voice the same sullen monotone as always. Brent couldn’t act to save his soul, yet in a weird way that tone sounded like someone scared into abject mindlessness.

“No one’s going to hurt you. We want to move you someplace better, and get you some food. Come on out.” The boss kidnapper sounded as reasonable as always. “Come on out,” a bit more sharply. Did she think she could bag them all without even mussing her jacket? There was quiet for a second or two… Viki heard a faint sigh of irritation. There was a rush of motion.

Gokna and Viki dived as hard as they could. They were only five feet up. Without the twine, they would have crushed their skulls on the floor. Instead, the elastic snapped them back, heads down, through the open doorway.

Gunfire flashed sideways, seeking Brent’s voice.

Viki had a glimpse of head and arms, and some kind of gun. She smashed into the leader at the rear of her back, knocking her flat, sending her gun skittering across the floor. But the other cobber was a couple of feet behind. Gokna hit him in the hard of his shoulders, scrabbled to hold on. But the other bounced her off. A single burst of fire from his gun smashed Gokna’s middle. Shards and blood spattered the wall behind her.

And then Brent was upon him.

The one under Viki bucked upward, smashing her into the top of the doorway. Things got very dark and distant after that. Somewhere she heard more gunfire, other voices.

THIRTY-TWO

Viki wasn’t badly hurt, a small amount of internal bleeding that the doctors could easily control. Jirlib had taken a lot of dents and some twisted arms. Poor Brent was worse off.

When that strange Major Thract was done asking his questions, Viki and Jirlib visited Brent in the house infirmary. Daddy was already there, perched beside the bed. They had been free almost three hours; Daddy still looked stunned.

Brent lay in deep padding, a siphon of water within reach of his eating hands. He tilted his head as they came in, and waved a weak smile. “I’m okay.” Just two split legs and a couple of buckshot holes.

Jirlib patted his shoulders.

“Where’s Mother?” asked Viki.

Dad’s head swayed uncertainly, “She’s in the building. She promised she’ll see you this evening. It’s just that so much has happened. You know this wasn’t just some crazy people who did this, right?”

Viki nodded. There were more security types in the house than ever before and even some uniformed troops outside. Major Thract’s people had been full of questions about the kidnappers, their mannerisms, how they acted toward each other, their choice of words. They even tried to hypnotize Viki, to squeeze out every last driblet of recollection. She could have saved them the trouble. Viki and Gokna had tried for years to hypnotize each other without any success.

Not a single kidnapper had survived the capture; Thract implied that at least one had killed herself to avoid capture.

“The General needs to figure out who is behind this, and how it changes the way the Accord looks at its enemies.”

“It was the Kindred,” Viki said flatly. She truly had no evidence beyond the military bearing of the kidnappers. But Viki read the newspapers as much as anyone, and Daddy talked enough about the risks of conquering the Dark.

Underhill shrugged at her assertion. “Probably. The main thing for the family is that things have changed.”

“Yes.” Viki’s voice cracked. “Daddy!Of course things have changed; how can they ever be the same?”

Jirlib lowered his head till it rested limply on Brent’s perch.

Underhill seemed to shrink in on himself. “Children, I am so sorry. I never meant for you to be hurt. I didn’t mean for…”

“Daddy, it was Gokna ’n’ me who snuck out of the house—Be quiet, Jirlib. I know you are the oldest, but we could always tweak you around.” It was true. Sometimes the sisters used their brother’s ego, sometimes his intellectual interests—as with the Distort exhibit. Sometimes they simply traded on his fondness for his little sisters. And Brent had his own set of weaknesses. “It was Gokna and me who made this possible. Without Brent doing his ambush at the museum, we’d all be dead now.”

Underhill gestured no. “Oh, Little Victory, without you and Gokna the rescuers would have been a minute too late. You would all be dead. Gokna—”

“But now Gokna is dead!” Suddenly her armor of unfeeling was broken, and she was swept away. Viki shrieked without words and raced from the room. She fled down the hall to the central stairs, weaving round the uniforms and the everyday inhabitants of the house. A few arms reached out for her, but someone called out from behind, and she was let past.

Up and up Viki ran, past the labs and the classrooms, past the atrium where they always played, where they first met Hrunkner Unnerby.

At the summit was the little gabled attic that she and Gokna had demanded and pleaded and schemed for. Some like the deepest and some like the highest. Daddy always reached for the highest and his two daughters had loved to look down from their lofty perch. It wasn’t the highest place in Princeton, but it had been enough.

Viki ran inside, slammed the door. For an instant, she was a little dizzy from the nonstop climb. And then… She froze, staring all around her. There was the attercop house, grown huge over the last five years. As the winters got colder, it had lost its original charm; you couldn’t pretend the little critters were people when they started sprouting wings. Dozens of them flittered in and out of the feeders. The ultra and blue of their wings was almost like a wallboard design on the sides of the house. She and Gokna had argued endlessly over who was the mistress of that house.

They had argued about almost everything. There by the wall was the artillery-shell dollhouse that Gokna had brought up from the den. It really had been Gokna’s, yet still they argued about it.

The signs of Gokna were everywhere here. And Gokna would never be here again. They could never talk again, not even to argue. Viki almost turned and bolted back out of the room. It was as though a monstrous hole had been torn in her side, her arms and legs ripped from her body. There was nowhere left for her life to stand. Viki sank down in a pile, shivering.

Fathers and mothers were very different sorts of people. From what the children had been able to figure, some of this was true even for normal families. Dad was around all the time. He was the one who had infinite patience, the one they could usually wheedle extra favors from. But Sherkaner Underhill had his own special nature, surely not the usual: He regarded every rule of nature and culture as an obstacle to be thought about, experimented with. There was humor and cleverness in everything he did.

Mothers—their mother, anyway—was not around every minute, and could not be depended upon to buckle to every childish demand. General Victory Smith was with her children often enough, one day out of ten up in Princeton, and much more so when they went on trips down to Lands Command. She was there when real rules had to be laid down, ones that even Sherkaner Underhill might hesitate to bend. And she was there when you had really, really screwed up.

Viki didn’t know how long she had been lying in a huddle when she heard steps ticking up the stairs to her room. Surely not more than half an hour; beyond the windows, it was still the middle of a cool, beautiful afternoon.

There was soft tapping at her door. “Junior? Can we talk?” Mother.

Something strange stirred in Viki: welcome. Daddy could forgive, he always forgave… but Mother would understand how terrible she really had been.

Viki opened the door, stepped back with her head bowed. “I thought you were busy until tonight.” Then she noticed that Victory Smith was in uniform, the black-black jacket and sleeves, the ultra and red shoulder tabs. She had never seen the General in that uniform up here in Princeton, and even down in Lands Command it had been reserved for special times, for briefings given to certain superiors.

The General stepped quietly into the room. “I—decided this was more important.” She motioned Little Victory to sit beside her. Viki sat, feeling calmness for the first time since this all began. Two of the General’s forearms draped lightly across her shoulders. “There have been some serious… mistakes made. You know that both your father and I agree about that?”

Viki nodded. “Yes, yes!”

“We can never bring Gokna back. But we can remember her, and love her, and correct the mistakes that allowed this terrible thing to happen.”

“Yes!”

“Your father—I—thought we should keep you out of the larger problems, at least until you were grown. Up to a point, we were right perhaps. But now I see, we put you at terrible risk.”

“No!… Mother, don’t you understand? It was me, a-and Gokna, who broke the rules. We fooled Captain Downing. We just didn’t believe the things that Dad and you warned us about.”

The General’s arms tapped Viki’s shoulders lightly. Mother was either surprised, or suddenly angry. Viki couldn’t tell which, and for a long moment her mother was silent. Then, “You’re right. Sherkaner and I made mistakes… but so did you and Gokna. Neither of you meant any harm… but now you know that’s not enough. In some games, when you make mistakes, people get killed. But think about it, Victory. Once you saw things turned bad, you behaved very well—better than many cobbers with professional training would have done. You saved the lives of the Suabisme children—”

“We risked little Birbop to—”

Smith shrugged angrily. “Yes. You’ll find a hard lesson there, daughter. I’ve spent most of my life trying to live with that one.” She was silent again, and something about her seemed very far away. It suddenly occurred to Viki that indeed, even Mother must make mistakes; it wasn’t just courtesy that she said so. All their lives, the children had admired the General. She didn’t talk about what she did, but they knew enough to guess she was more than the heroine of any dozen adventure novels. Now Viki had a glimpse of what that must really mean. She moved closer to her mother’s side.

“Viki, when the crunch finally came, you and Gokna did what was right. All four of you did. There was a terrible price, but if we—you—don’t learn from that, then we’ve really screwed up.” Then Gokna died fornothing.

“I’ll change; I’ll do anything. Tell me.”

“The outside changes aren’t so big. I’ll get you some tutors in military topics, maybe some physical training. But you and the younger children still have so much book learning to do. Your time will be pretty much as before. The big change will be inside your head and in the way we treat you. Beyond the learning, there are enormous, deadly risks that you must understand. Hopefully, they’ll never be the minute-to-minute deadliness of this morning—but in the long run the dangers are much greater. I’m sorry, this is a time more risky than any before.”

“And with more good possibilites, too.” Daddy always said that. What would the General say to that now?

“Yes. That is true. And that is why he and I have done what we have. But it will take more than hope and optimism to achieve what Sherkaner intends, and the years until then will be more and more dangerous. What happened today is just the beginning. It’s possible that the deadliest times will come when I’m very old. And your father is a half generation older than I….

“I said you four did well today. More than that, you were a team. Have you ever thought that our whole family is like a team? We have a special advantage over almost anyone else: We’re not all of a single generation, or even two. We’re spread from Little Hrunk all the way up to your father. We’re loyal to one another. And I think we’re very talented.”

Viki smiled back at he rmother. “None of us is near as smart as Daddy.”

Victory laughed. “Yes, well. Sherkaner is… unique.”

Viki continued, analytical: “Actually, except for maybe Jirlib, none of us is even in a class with Daddy’s students. On the other hand, me and G-Gokna, we took after you, Mom. We—I can plan with people and with things. I think Rhapsa and Little Hrunk are somewhere in between, once they settle down. And Brent, he’s not stupid, but his mind works in funny ways. He doesn’t get along with other people, but he’s the most naturally suspicious of any of us. He’s always watching out for us.”

The General smiled. “He’ll do. There’s five of you left now, Viki. Seven when you count myself and Sherkaner. The team. You’re right in your estimates. What you can’t know is how you compare to the rest of the world. Let me tell you my coldly professional assessment: You children can be the best. We wanted to postpone starting things a few more years for you, but that has changed. If the times I fear come, I want you five to know what is going on. If necessary, I want you five to be able to act even if everyone else is in a mess.”

Victory Junior was more than old enough to understand about service oaths and chains of command. “Everyone? I—” She pointed at the rank tabs on her mother’s shoulders.

“Yes, I live by my loyalty to the Crown. I’m saying that there may come times when—in the short term—serving the Crown means doing things outside the visible chain of command.” She smiled at her daughter. “Some of the adventure novels are right, Viki. The head of Accord Intelligence does have her own special authority… Oops, I have postponed my other meetings long enough. We will talk again, very soon, all of us.”

After the General was gone, Viki wandered around her little bedroom at the top of the hill. She was still in a daze, but no longer felt unrelieved horror. There was also wonder and hope. She and Gokna had always played at espionage. But Mother didn’t talk of what she did, and she was so far above the military of everyday that it seemed a foolish dream to try to follow her. Business intelligence, maybe with companies like Hrunkner Unnerby had founded, that seemed more realistic. Now—

Viki played with Gokna’s little dollhouse for a moment. She and Gokna would never get to argue about these plans. Mother’s team had suffered its first loss. But now it knew it was a team: Jirlib and Brent, Rhapsa, Little Hrunk, Viki, Victory and Sherkaner. They would learn to do their best.And in the end, that will be enough.

THIRTY-THREE

For Ezr Vinh, the years passed quickly, and not just because of his quarter-time Watch cycle. The time since the ambush and the murders was almost a third of his life. These were the years his inner self had promised would be played out with unswerving patience, never giving up the struggle to destroy Tomas Nau and win back what still survived. It was a time he had thought would stretch into endless torment.

Yes. He had played with unswerving patience. And there had been pain… and shame. Yet his fear was most times a distant thing. And though he still didn’t know the details, just knowing that he was working for Pham Nuwen gave Ezr the sure feeling that in the end they would triumph. But the biggest surprise was something that popped up again and again for uneasy introspection: In some ways, these years were more more satisfying than any time since early childhood. Why was that?

Podmaster Nau made thrifty use of the remaining medical automation, and he kept critical “functions” such as translators on-Watch much of the time. Trixia was in her forties now. Ezr saw her almost every day he was on-Watch, and the little changes in her face tore at him.

But there were other changes in Trixia, changes that made him think that his presence and the passing years were somehow bringing her back to him.

When he came early to her tiny cell in Hammerfest’s Attic, she would still ignore him. But then, once, he arrived one hundred seconds after the usual time. Trixia was sitting facing the door. “You’re late,” she said. Her tone was the same flat impatience that Anne Reynolt might use. All the Focused were notorious about punctilio. Still. Trixia had noticed his absence.

And he noticed that Trixia was beginning to do some of her own grooming. Her hair was brushed back, almost neatly, when he arrived for their sessions. Now, as often as not, their conversations were not completely one-sided… at least if he was careful about the topics.

This day, Ezr entered her cell on time, but with some smuggled cargo—two delitesse cakelets from Benny’s parlor. “For you.” He reached out, bringing one cakelet close to her. The fragrance filled the cell. Trixia stared at his hand, briefly, as if contemplating a rude gesture. Then she waved the distraction away. “You were going to bring the Cur-plus-One translation requests.”

Sigh.But he left the confection tacked to the workspace near her hand. “Yes, I have them.” Ezr settled in his usual spot by the door, facing her. Actually, the list wasn’t long today. Focus could work miracles, but without a glue of normal common sense, the different specialist groups wandered off into private navel inspection. Ezr and the other normals read summaries of the Focused work and tried to see where each group of specialists had found something that was of interest beyond the zipheads’ fixation. Those were reported upward, to Nau, and back downward, as requests for additional work.

Today, Trixia had no trouble accommodating the requests, though she muttered darkly at some of them, “Waste of time.”

“Also, I’ve been talking to Rita Liao. Her programmers are very enthusiastic about the stuff you’ve been giving them. They’ve designed a suite of financial applications and network software that should run great on the Spiders’ new microprocessors.”

Trixia was nodding. “Yes, yes. I talk to them everyday.” The translators got along famously with the low-code programmers and the financial/legal zipheads. Ezr suspected it was because the translators were ignorant of those fields, and vice versa.

“Rita wants to set up a groundside company to market the programs. They should beat anything local, and we want saturation.”

“Yes, yes. Prosperity Software Incorporated; I already invented a name. But it’s still too early.”

He chatted it back and forth with her, trying to get a realistic time estimate to pass on to Rita Liao. Trixia was on a co-thread with the zipheads who were doing the insertion strategy, so their combined opinion was probably pretty good. Doing everything across a computer network—even with perfect knowledge and planning—depended on the sophistication of that net. It would be at least five years before a big commercial market developed in software, and a little longer before the Spiders’ public networks took off. Until then, it would be next to impossible to be a major groundside player. Even now, the only manipulations they could do consistently were of the Accord’s military net.

Too soon, Ezr came to the last item on his list. It might seem a small thing, but from long experience he knew it was trouble. “New topic, Trixia—but it’s a real translation question: about the color ‘plaid.’ I notice you are still using that term in descriptions of visual scenes. The physiologist—”

“Kakto.” Trixia’s eyes narrowed slightly. Where the zipheads interacted, there was normally an almost telepathic closeness—or else they hated each other’s guts with the sort of freezing hostility usually seen only in academic romance novels. Norm Kakto and Trixia oscillated between these states.

“Yes. Um, anyway, Dr. Kakto gave me a long lecture about the nature of vision and the electromagnetic spectrum and assured me that talking about a color ‘plaid’ could not correspond to anything meaningful.”

Trixia’s features screwed into a frown, and for a moment she looked much older than Ezr liked to see. “It’s a real word. I chose it. The context had a feel—” The frown intensified. More often than not what seemed a translation mistake turned out to be—perhaps not a literal truth, but at least a clue to some unrecognized aspect of the Spiders’ reality. But the Focused translators, even Trixia, could be wrong. In her early translations, where she and the others were still feeling their way across an unknown racial landscape—there had been hundreds of facile word choices; a good portion of them had to be abandoned later.

The problem was that zipheads did not take easily to abandoning fixation.

Trixia was coming close to real upset. The signs were not extreme. She often frowned, though not this fiercely. And even when she was silent, she was endlessly active with her two-handed keyboard. But this time the analysis coming back at her spilled from her head-up display to paint across the walls. Her breath came faster as she turned the criticism back and forth in her mind and on the attached network. She didn’t have any counterexplanation.

Ezr reached out, touched her shoulder. “Follow-up question, Trixia. I talked with Kakto about this ‘plaid’ thing for some time.” In fact, Ezr had all but badgered the man. Often that was the only way that worked with a Focused specialist: Concentrate on the ziphead’s specialty and the problem at hand, and keep asking your question in different ways. Without some skill and reasonable luck, the technique would quickly bring communication to an end. Even after seven Watch years, Ezr wasn’t an expert, but in this case Norm Kakto had finally been provoked into generating alternatives: “We were wondering, perhaps the Spiders have such a surplus of visual methods that the Spider brain has to multiplex access—you know, a fraction of a second sensing in one spectral regime, a fraction of a second in another. They might sense—I don’t know, some kind of rippling effect.”

In fact, Kakto had dismissed the idea as absurd, saying that even if the Spider brain time-shared on its visual senses, the perception would still seem continuous at the conscious level.

As he spoke the words, Trixia became nearly motionless, only her fingers continuing to move. Her constantly shifting gaze fixed for a long second… directly on Ezr’s eyes. He was saying something that was nontrivial and near the center of her Focus. Then she looked away, began muttering to her voice input, and pounded even more furiously on the keys. A few seconds passed and her eyes began darting around the room, tracking phantoms that were only visible in her own head-up. Then, abruptly, “Yes! That is the explanation. I never really thought before… it was just the context that made me pick the word, but—” Dates and locations spread across the walls where they could both see. Ezr tried to keep up, but his own huds were still barred from the Hammerfest net; he had to depend on Trixia’s vague gestures to know the incidents she was citing.

Ezr found himself grinning. Just now Trixia came about the closest she could to normality, even if it was a kind of frenetic triumph…. “Look! Except for one case of pain overload, every use of ‘plaid’ has involved low haze, low humidity, and a wide range of brightness. In those situations, the whole color… the vetmoot3…” She was using internal jargon now, the inscrutable stuff that flowed between the Focused translators. “The language mood is changed. I needed a special word, and ‘plaid’ is good enough.”

He listened and watched. He could almost see the insight spreading within Trixia’s mind, setting up new connections, no doubt improving all later translations. Yes, it looked real. The jackboots could not complain about the color “plaid.”

It was altogether a good session. And then Trixia did something that was a wondrous surprise. With scarcely a break in her speech, one hand left her keyboard and snatched sideways at the delitesse. She broke the cakelet free of its anchor and stared into the froth and fragrence—as if suddenly recognizing what the cakelet was and the pleasure that came from eating such things. Then she jammed the thing into her mouth, and the light frosting splashed in colorful drops across her lips. He thought for a moment that she was choking, but the sound was just a happy laugh. She chewed, and swallowed… and after a moment she gave the most contented sigh. It was the first time in all these years that Ezr had seen her happy about something outside her Focus.

Even her hands stopped their constant motion for a few seconds. Then, “So. What else?”

It took a moment for the question to penetrate Ezr’s daze. “Ah, um.” In fact, that had been the last item on his list. Butjoy ! The delitesse had made a miracle. “J-just one thing more, Trixia. Something you should know.” Maybe something you can finally understand. “You are not a machine. You’re a human being.”

But the words had no impact. Maybe she didn’t even hear them. Her fingers were tapping at her keys again, and her gaze was somewhere in huds imagery he couldn’t see. Ezr waited several seconds, but whatever attention there had been seemed to have vanished. He sighed, and moved back to the cell’s doorway.

Then perhaps ten or fifteen seconds after he had spoken, Trixia abruptly looked up. There was expression on her face again, but this time it was surprise. “Really? I’m not a machine?”

“Yes. You are a real person.”

“Oh.” Disinterest again. She returned to her keyboards, muttering on the voice link to her invisible ziphead siblings. Ezr quietly slipped out. In the early years, he would have felt crushed, or at least set back, by the curt dismissal. But… this was just ziphead normality. And for a moment he had broken through it. Ezr crawled back through the capillary corridors. Usually these kinking, barely-shoulders-wide passages got on his nerves. Every two meters another cell doorway, right side, top, left side, bottom. What if there was ever a panic here? What if they ever needed to evacuate? But today… echoes came back to him, and suddenly he realized he was whistling.

Anne Reynolt intercepted him as he emerged into Hammerfest’s main vertical corridor. She jabbed a finger at the carrier trailing behind him. “I’ll take that.”

Damn.He’d intended to leave the second delitesse with Trixia. He gave Reynolt the carrier. “Things went well. You’ll see in my report—”

“Indeed. I think I’ll have that report right now.” Reynolt gestured down the hundred-meter drop. She grabbed a wall stop, flipped feet for head, and started downward. Ezr followed. Where they passed openings in the caisson, OnOff’s light shone through a thin layer of diamond crystal. And then they were back in artificial light, deeper and deeper in the mass of Diamond One. The mosaic carving looked as fresh as the day it was done, but here and there the hand and foot traffic had laid patches of grime on the fretwork. There weren’t many unskilled zipheads left, not enough to maintain Emergent perfection. They turned sideways at the bottom, still gently descending but coasting past busy offices and labs—all familiar to Ezr now. The ziphead clinic. There, Ezr had been only once. It was closely guarded, closely monitored, but not quite off-limits. Pham was a regular visitor there, Trud Silipan’s great friend. But Ezr avoided the place; it was where souls were stolen.

Reynolt’s office was where it had always been, at the end of the lab tunnel, behind a plain door. The “Director of Human Resources” settled in her chair and opened the carrier she had taken from Ezr.

Vinh pretended to be unperturbed. He looked around the office. Nothing new, the same rough walls, the storage crates and seemingly loose equipment that still—after decades on-Watch—were her principal furniture. Even if he had never been told, Ezr would have long since guessed that Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. A miraculous, people-oriented ziphead, but still a ziphead.

Reynolt was obviously not surprised by the contents of the carrier. She sniffed at the delitesse with the expression of a bactry technician assessing slime ferment. “Very aromatic. Candy and junk food are not on the allowed diet list, Mr. Vinh.”

“I’m sorry. I just meant it as a treat… a little reward. I don’t do it often.”

“True. In fact, you’ve never done it before.” Her gaze flickered around his face, then moved away. “It’s been thirty years, Mr. Vinh. Seven years of your own life-time on-Watch. You know that zipheads do not respond to such ‘rewards’; their motive system is primarily within their area of Focus and secondarily attached to their owners. No… I think you still have your secret plans to waken love in Dr. Bonsol.”

“With a dessert confection?”

Reynolt gave him a hard little smile. His sarcasm would have gone right past an ordinary ziphead. It didn’t deflect Reynolt, but she recognized it. “With the smell, perhaps. I imagine you’ve been into some Qeng Ho neurology courses—found something about olfactory pathways having independent access to the higher centers. Hmm?” For an instant her gaze skewered him like a bug in a collection.

That’s exactly what the neuro courses said.And the delitesse was something that Trixia would not have smelled since before she was Focused. For a moment, the walls around Trixia’s true self had thinned to barely more than a veil. For a moment, Ezr had touched her.

Ezr shrugged. Reynolt was so very sharp. If she ever thought to look, she was surely bright enough to see all the way through him. She was probably bright enough to see through even Pham Nuwen. The only thing that saved them was that Pham and Ezr were at the edge of her Focus.IfRitser Brughel had a snoop even half as good, Pham and I would be deadnow.

Reynolt turned away from him, for a moment tracked phantoms in her huds. Then, “Your misbehavior has caused no harm. In some ways, Focus is a robust state. You may think you see changes in Dr. Bonsol, but consider: Over the last few years, all the best translators have begun to show synthetic affect. If it hurts performance, we’ll take them down to the clinic for some tuning….

“However, if you actively attempt manipulation again, I will keep you out of Dr. Bonsol’s way.”

It was a totally effective threat, but Ezr tried to laugh. “What, no death threats?”

“My assessment, Mr. Vinh: Your knowledge of Humankind’s Dawn Age civilization makes you extremely valuable. You’re an effective interface between at least four of my groups—and I know that the Podmaster uses your advice as well. But make no mistake: I can get along without you in the translation department. If you cross me again, you won’t see Dr. Bonsol till after the mission is complete.”

Fifteen years? Twenty?

Ezr stared at her, feeling the utter certainty in her words. What an implacable creature this woman was. Not for the first time, he wondered what she had been like before. He was not alone in that. Trud Silipan regaled the patrons at Benny’s with the speculations. The Xevalle clique had once been the second most powerful in the Emergency; Trud claimed she had been high in its ranks. At one time she might have been a greater monster than Tomas Nau. At least some of them got punished; crushed by their own kind. Anne Reynolt had fallen far, from being a knowing Satan to being a Satan’s tool.

…Whether that made her more or less than before, she was dangerous enough for Ezr Vinh.

That night, alone in the dark of his room, Ezr described the encounter to Pham Nuwen. “I get the feeling that if Reynolt ever transferred to Brughel’s operation, she’d figure out about you and me in a matter of Ksecs.”

Nuwen’s chuckle was a distorted buzzing sound deep in Ezr’s ear. “That’s a transfer that will never happen. She’s the only thing that’s holding the ziphead operation together. She had a staff of four hundred unFocused interface types before the Ambush—now she’s buzz zzzt.”

“Say the last again.”

“I said, ‘Now she’s depending for much of her support on untrained help. ’ “

The buzz that was not quite a voice faded in and out of intelligibility. There were still times when Ezr had to ask for three or four repetitions. But it was a big improvement over the blinkertalk they had used in the beginning. Now, when Ezr pretended to go to sleep, he had a single millimeter-long localizer pressed deep in his ear. The result was mostly buzzing and hissing, nearly inaudible, but with enough practice you could normally guess the speech behind it. The localizers were scattered all around the room—all around the Traders’ temp. They had become Brughel and Nau’s primary security tool here.

“Still, maybe I shouldn’t have tried the delitesse trick.”

“…Maybe. I wouldn’t have tried anything so overt.” But then PhamNuwen wasn’t in love with Trixia Bonsol. “We’ve talked about this before. Brughel’s zipheads are more powerful than any security tool we Qeng Ho ever imagined. They’re sniffing all the time, and they can read”—Ezr couldn’t make out the word: “naive”? “innocent”?; he didn’t feel like asking for clarification—“people like you. Face it. They surely guess that you don’t believe their story about the Diem Massacre. They know you’re hostile. They know you’re scheming—or wishing to scheme—about something. Your feelings for Bonsol give you a cover, a lesser lie to hide the greater one. Like my Zamle Eng thing.”

“Yeah.” But I think I’ll cool it for a while. “So you don’t think Reynolt is that much of a threat?”

For a moment, all he heard was buzzing and hissing; maybe Pham wasn’t saying anything. Then: “Vinh, I think very much the opposite. In the long run, she’s the deadliest threat we face.”

“But she’s not in Security.”

“No, but she maintains Brughel’s snoops, tweaks up their poor brains when they begin to drift. Phuong and Hom can only do the simpler cases; Trud pretends he can do everything, but he just follows her directions. And she has eight ziphead programmers going through our fleet code. Three of them are still grinding away at the localizers. Eventually, she’s going to see how I’ve scammed them. bzzz mumble Lord! The power Nau has.” Pham’s voice cut out, and there was just the background noise.

Ezr reached out from his blankets and stuck a finger in his ear, pushing the tiny localizer deeper. “Say again? Are you still there?”

bzzt “I’m here. About Reynolt: She’s deadly. One way or another, she must be removed.”

“Kill her?” The words caught in Ezr’s throat. For all he that he hated Nau and Brughel and the whole system of Focus, he didn’t hate Anne Reynolt. In her own limited way, she looked after the slaves. Whatever Anne Reynolt had been, now she was just a tool.

“I hope not! Maybe… if Nau would just take the bait on the localizers, if he would just start using them in Hammerfest. Then we’d be as safe over there as we are here. If that happens before her zips figure out that it’s a trap…”

“But the whole point of the delay was to give her time to study the localizers.”

“Yeah. Nau is no fool. Don’t worry. I’m tracking things. If she gets too close, I’ll… take care of her.”

For a moment, Ezr tried to imagine what Pham might do, then forced his mind from the imaginings. Even after two thousand years, the Vinh Family still had a special place in its affection for the memory of Pham Nuwen. Ezr remembered the pictures that had been in his father’s den. He remembered the stories his aunt had told him. Not all of them were in the Qeng Ho archives. That meant the stories weren’t true—or else they were truly private reminiscences, what G’mama Sura and her children had really thought of Pham Nuwen. They loved him for more than founding the modern Qeng Ho, for more than being g’papa to all the Vinh Families. But some of the stories showed a hard side to the man.

Ezr opened his eyes, looked quietly around the darkened room. Vague night-gleams lit his fatigues floating in the closet sack, showed the delitesse still sitting uneaten on his desk. Reality. “What can you really do with the localizers, Pham?”

Silence. Faraway buzzing. “What can I do? Well, Vinh, I can’t kill with them… not directly. But they are good for more than this crummy audio link. It takes practice; there are tricks you have to see.” Long pause. “Hell, you need to learn ’em. There could be times when I’m out of link, and they’re the only things that can save your cover. We should get together in person—”

“Huh? Face-to-face? How?” Dozens, maybe hundreds of times he and Pham Nuwen had plotted as they did tonight, like prisoners tapping anonymously on dungeon walls. In public, they saw less of each other than in the early Watches. Nuwen had said that Ezr just wasn’t good enough at controlling his eyes and body language, that the snoops would guess too much. Now—

“Here in the temp, Brughel and his zipheads are depending on the localizers. There are places ’tween the balloon hulls where some of their old cameras have died. If we run into each other there, they’ll have nothing to contradict what I feed them through the localizers. The problem is, I’m sure the snoops rely on statistics as much as anything. Once upon a time I ran a fleet security department, like Ritser’s except a bit more mellow. I had programs that highlighted suspicious behavior—who was out of sight when, unusual conversations, equipment failures. It worked pretty well, even when I couldn’t catch the bad guys red-handed. Zipheads plus computers should be a thousand times better. I bet they have stat traces extending back to the beginning of L1. For them, innocuous behaviors add up and add up—and one fine day Ritser Brughel has circumstantial evidence. And we’re dead.”

Lord of Trade. “But we could get away with almost anything!” Wherever the Emergents depended on Qeng Ho localizers.

“Maybe. Once. Curb the impulse.” Even in the buzzing speech, Ezr could tell that Pham was chuckling.

“When can we meet?”

“Sometime that minimizes the effect on Ritser’s merry analysts. Let’s see… I’m going off-Watch in less than two hundred Ksec. I’ll be partway through a Watch the next time you are on. I’ll fix things so we can do it right after that.”

Ezr sighed.Half a year of lifetime away. But not as far away as some things; it would do.

THIRTY-FOUR

Benny’s booze parlor had begun as something sublegal, the visible evidence of a large network of black-market transactions—capital crimes by Emergent standards; in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term “black market” existed, but only to denote “trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers.” In the small community around the rockpile, there was no way to conduct trade or bribe in secret. During the early years, only Qiwi Lisolet’s involvement had protected the parlor. Now… Benny Wen smiled to himself as he stacked the drinks and dinners into his weir. Now he managed here full time whenever he was on-Watch. Best of all, it was a job his father could mostly handle when Benny and Gonle were off. Hunte Wen was still a drifty, gentle soul, and he had never regained his competence in physics. But he had come to love managing the parlor. When he managed it alone, strange things could happen to the place. Sometimes they were ludicrous failures, sometimes marvelous improvements. There was the time he cadged a perfumed lacquer from the volatiles refinery. The smell was okay in small quantities, but painted on the parlor’s walls, it gave off a terrible stink. For a while the largest dayroom became the social hub of the temp. There was another time—four real years later—when he redeemed a Watch’s worth of favor scrip, and Qiwi’s papa devised a zero-gee vine and associated ecosystem to decorate the parlor’s walls and furniture. The place was transformed into a beautiful, parklike space.

The vines and flowers still remained, even though Hunte had been off-Watch for almost two years.

Benny moved up from the bar, in a long circuit through the forest of greenery. Drinks and food were delivered to tables of customers, paper favors paid in return. Benny set a Diamonds and Ice and a meal bucket in front of Trud Silipan. Silipan slipped him a promise-of-favor with the same smug look as always. He obviously figured the promise counted for nothing, that he only paid off because it was convenient.

Benny just smiled and moved on. Who was he to argue—and in a sense, Trud was right. But since the early Watches, very few favors were ever flatly repudiated. Weaseled, yes. The only favors Trud could really give involved service time with the Focused, and he constantly chiseled on his obligations, not finding quite the right specialists, not spending enough ziphead time to get the best answers. But even Trud came through often enough, as with the zero-gee vines he’d caused Ali Lin to design. For behind the farce of paper favors, everyone knew that there was Tomas Nau, who—from clever self-interest or love of Qiwi—had made it clear that the Qeng Ho underground economy had his protection.

“Hello, Benny! Up here!” Jau Xin waved to him from the upper table, the “debating society” table. Watch on Watch, the same sort of people seemed to hang out here. There was usually some overlap between Watches—apparently enough so that even when most of the customers were different, they still sat over here if they wanted to argue about “where it will all end.” This Watch it was Xin and of course Rita Liao, five or six other faces that were no surprise, and—aha, someone who really knew his stuff: “Ezr! I thought it would be four hundred Ksec before you showed up here.” Damn if he didn’t wish he could stay and listen.

“Hi, Benny!” Ezr’s face showed the familiar grin. Funny when you didn’t see a guy for a while, how the changes from times earlier were suddenly sharp. Ezr—like Benny—was still a young man. But they were no longer kids. There were the faintest creases near Ezr’s eyes. And when he spoke, there was a confidence Benny had never seen when they had been on Jimmy Diem’s work crew. “Nothing solid for me, Benny. My gut is still complaining about being unfrozen. There was a four-day change in schedule.” He pointed at the Watch-tree display on the wall by the bar. Sure enough, the update was there, hidden in a flurry of other small changes. “Looks like Anne Reynolt has need of my presence.”

Rita Liao smiled. “That by itself is reason for a meeting of the Debating Society.”

Benny distributed the bulbs and buckets that floated in the weir behind him. He nodded at Ezr. “I’ll get you something to soothe your just-thawed carcass.”

Ezr watched Benny Wen head back to the bar and food prep. Benny probably could find something that wouldn’t upset his stomach. Who’d have thought he’d end up like this? Who’d have thought any of them would. At least Benny was still a Trader, even if on a heartbreakingly small scale. And I’m… what? A conspirator with cover so deep that sometimes it fooled even him. Ezr was sitting here with three Qeng Ho and four Emergents—and some of the Emergents were better friends than the Qeng Ho. No wonder Tomas Nau did so well. He had coopted them all, even as they thought they were following the Traders’ Way. Nau had blunted their minds to the slavery that was Focus. And maybe it was for the best. Ezr’s friends were protected from the deadliness of Nau and Brughel—and Nau and Brughel were dulled to the possibility that there might be Qeng Ho who still worked against them.

“So what got you out of the freezer early, Ezr?”

Vinh shrugged. “Beats me. I’m going down to Hammerfest in a few Ksecs. “Whatever it is, I hope it doesn’t mess up my meeting with Pham.

Trud Silipan rose up through the floor spaces, settled in an empty seat. “It’s no big thing, a snit between the translators and the hard-science zipheads. We got it resolved earlier today.”

“So why did Reynolt change Ezr’s schedule?”

Silipan rolled his eyes. “Ah, you know Reynolt. No offense, Ezr, but she thinks that since your specialty is the Dawn Age, we can’t get along without you.”

Hardly,thought Ezr, remembering his last encounter with the Director of Human Resources.

Rita said, “I’ll bet tas something to do with Calorica Bay. The children are down there now, you know.” When Rita spoke of “the children” she was talking about the Spiders from the old “Children’s Hour of Science.”

“They’re not children anymore,” Xin said gently. “Victory Junior is a young wo—young adult.”

Liao shrugged irritably. “Rhapsa and Little Hrunk still qualify as children. They’ve all moved down to Calorica.”

There was an embarrassed pause. The adventures of specific Spiders were an unending drama for many—and as the years passed, it became easier to get more details. There were other families being followed by the Spider fans, but the Underhill one was still the most popular. Rita was easily the biggest fanatic, and sometimes she was just too pathetically obvious.

Trud was oblivious of the sad byplay. “No, Calorica is a scam.”

Xin laughed. “Hey, Trud, there really is a launch site just south of Calorica. These Spiders are launching satellites.”

“No, no. I meant to say thecavorite thing is a scam. That’s what got Ezr rousted early.” He noticed Ezr’s reaction and his smirk broadened. “You recognize the term.”

“Yes, it’s—”

Trud rolled on, not interested in classical trivia: “It’s another of the translators’ screwball references, just more obscure than most. Anyway, a year ago, some Spiders were using abandoned mines in the altiplano south of Calorica, trying to find a difference between gravitational mass and inertial mass. The whole thing makes you wonder how bright these creatures really are.”

“The idea is not stupid,” said Ezr, “until you’ve done some experiments to see otherwise.” He remembered the project now. It had been mainly Tiefer scientists. Their reports had been nearly inaccessible. The human translators had never learned Tiefic in the depth that they had the Accord languages. Xopi Reung and a couple of others might have become fluent in Tiefic, but they had died in the mindrot runaway.

Trud waved off the objection. “What’s stupid is, these Spiders eventually found adifference. And they posted their foolishness, claimed to have discovered antigravity in the altiplano.”

Ezr glanced at Jau Xin. “Have you heard of this?”

“I think so….” Jau looked thoughtful. Apparently this had been kept under wraps until now. “Reynolt has had me in with the zipheads a couple of times. They wanted to know about any orbital anomalies in our snoopersats.” He shrugged. “Of course there are anomalies. That’s how you do subsurface density maps.”

“Well,” Trud continued, “the Spiders who did this had about an Msec of fame before they discovered they couldn’t reproduce their miraculous discovery. Their retraction came out just a few Ksecs ago.” He chuckled. “What idiots. In a human civilization, their claim wouldn’t have lasted a day.”

“The Spiders arenot stupid,” said Rita.

“They’re not incompetent, either,” said Ezr. “Sure, most human societies would be very skeptical of such a report. But humans have had eight thousand years of experience with science. Even a fallen civ, if it were advanced enough to study such questions, would have library ruins that contained the human heritage.”

“Yeah, right. ‘Everything the Spiders do is for the first time.’ “

“But it’s true, Trud! We know they’re first-timers. We have only one case that’s really comparable—our rise upon Old Earth. And there are so many things that human first-timers got wrong.”

“In fact, we’re doing them a big favor by taking over.” That from Arlo Dinh, a Qeng Ho. He made the assertion with all the moral smugness of an Emergent.

Ezr nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, our Dawn Age ancestors had an awful lot of good luck to get out of the single-planet trap. And the Spider geniuses are no better than the old-time human ones. Look at this guy Underhill. His students have made a lot of things work, but—”

“But he’s full of superstitions,” Trud put in.

“Right. He has no concept of the limits of software design, and of the limits that puts on hardware. He thinks immortality and godlike computers are just around the corner, the product of just a little more progress. He’s a walking library of the Failed Dreams.”

“See! That’s the real reason you’re Reynolt’s favorite. You know what fantasies the Spiders might believe. When the time comes to take over, that will be important.”

“When the time comes…” Jau Xin gave a lopsided smile. On the far wall, by the Watch Chart, Benny had a window on the Coming-Out Party Betting Pool. Guessing just when they would come out of hiding, when the Exile would end—that was the eternal topic of parlor debate. “It’s been more than thirty real years since the sun relighted. I’m outside a lot, you know, almost as much as Qiwi Lisolet and her crews. These days, the sun is dimming down. We have just a few years till it’s dead again. The Spiders have themselves a deadline. I’m betting they’ll be into the Information Age in less than ten years.”

“No, not far enough for us to make a smooth takeover,” said Arlo.

“Okay. But in the end, other things may force our hand. The Spiders have the beginnings of a space program. In ten years, our operations—our presence here at L1—may be impossible to disguise.”

Trud: “So? They get too uppity, we whack ’em.”

Jau: “And cut our own throats, man.”

“You’re both talking nonsense,” said Arlo. “I’ll bet we have fewer than ten nukes left. Seems we used all the rest on each other a while back—”

“We have directed-energy weapons.”

“Yes, if we were in close orbit. I tell you, we couldbluff a good game, but—”

“We could drop our wrecked starships on the buggers.”

Ezr exchanged a glance with Rita Liao. This was the argument that sent her into full froth. She—and Jau and most of the people round the table—thought of the Spiders as people. That was Trixia’s triumph. The Emergents, at least outside the Podmaster class, were uncomfortable with the notion of megamurder. In any case, Jau Xin was certainly right: Whether or not the Emergents had the firepower, the whole object of the Lurk was to create a customer who could put the mission back in business. Blowing them up made sense only to crazies like Ritser Brughel.

Ezr leaned back, out of the argument. He had seen Pham’s name on the Watch Chart; just a few more days and they would have their first real meeting.Take it slow and patient, no rush. Okay. He hoped the Debating Society would move on to something more interesting, but even this nonsense was a pleasant familiar buzz. Not for the first time, Ezr realized this was almost like having family, a family that argued endlessly about problems that never seemed to change. He got along with even the Emergents, and they with him. Almost like a normal life…. He looked through the lattice of z-vines that filled the spaces around them. The flowers actually smelled faintly—though nothing like that stink-lacquer that Hunte tried before. Ah. A clear view opened through the flowers and leaves, to Benny’s station on the floor of the parlor. He started to wave to Benny. Maybe he could stomach some real food, after all. Then he saw a flash of checkered pants and fractille blouse.

Qiwi.

She and Benny were deep in negotiation. Benny pointed at the crappy section of wallpaper that stretched across the parlor’s bottom wall. Qiwi nodded, consulting some sort of list. Then she seemed to feel his gaze. She turned, and waved at Ezr’s group up by the ceiling.She is so beautiful. Ezr looked away, his face suddenly chill. Once Qiwi had been the brat who irritated him beyond measure. Once Qiwi had seemed a betrayer, abusing the zipheads. And once Ezr had hit her and hit her…. Ezr remembered the rage, howgood it felt to get some revenge for Jimmy Diem and Trixia Bonsol. But Qiwi was no betrayer; Qiwi was a victim more than she knew. If Pham was right about mindscrub—and he must be; the horror fit the facts too well—then Qiwi was a victim almost beyond human imagination. And in beating Qiwi, Ezr had learned something about himself. He had learned that Ezr Vinh’s decency must be a shallow thing. That self-knowledge was something he could keep tucked away most of the time. Maybe he could still do good, even if at bottom he was something vile…. But when he actually saw Qiwi, and when she saw him… then it was impossible to forget what he had done.

“Hi Qiwi!” Rita had noticed Qiwi’s wave. “Got a second? We want you to settle something for us.”

Qiwi grinned. “Be right there.” She turned back to Benny. He was nodding, handing her a bunch of paper favors. Then she came bouncing up the latticework of vines. She trailed Benny’s net, filled with beer refills and more snacks. In effect, she was doing some of Benny’s work for him. That was Qiwi for you. She was part of the underground economy, the hustlers that made things relatively comfortable here. Like Benny, she didn’t hesitate to lend a hand, towork. And at the same time, she had the Podmaster’s ear; she brought a softness to Nau’s regime that Emergents like Jau Xin could not consciously admit. But you could see it in Jau and Rita’s eyes; they were almost in awe of Qiwi Lisolet.

And she smiled at him. “Hi, Ezr. Benny figured you might want more.” She slid the bucket into sticking contact with the table in front of him. Ezr nodded, not able to meet her gaze.

Rita was already babbling at her; maybe no one noticed his awkwardness. “Not to ask for inside news, Qiwi, but what’s the latest estimate for our Coming-Out date?”

Qiwi smiled. “My guess? Twelve years at the outside. Spider progress with spaceflight may force our hand before that.”

“Yeah.” Rita slid a glance at Jau. “Well, we were wondering. Suppose we can’t grab everything via their computer networks. Suppose we have to take sides, play one power block off against another. Who would we back?”

THIRTY-FIVE

Diamond One was more than two thousand meters long and nearly as wide, by far the largest of all the rocks in the pile. Over the years, the crystal directly beneath Hammerfest had been carved into a labyrinth of caves. The upper levels were the labs and offices. Below that were Tomas’s private rooms. Below that was the latest addition to the inverted architecture: a lens-shaped void more than two hundred meters across. The making of it had worn out most of the thermal diggers, but Qiwi had not objected; in fact, this had been partly her idea.

Their three human forms were almost lost in the scale of the place. “So is this impressive, or is this impressive?” Qiwi asked, smiling at Tomas.

Nau was staring straight upward, his face slack with wonder. That didn’t happen often. He hadn’t noticed yet, but he’d lost his balance and was slowly falling over backwards. “I… yes. Even the huds mockup didn’t do it justice.”

Qiwi laughed, and patted him back toward vertical. “I confess. In the mockups I didn’t show the lights.” Actinic arcs were buried in the anechoic grooves of the ceiling. The lamps turned the sky into a coruscating gem. By tuning their output, almost any lighting effect could be obtained, but always tinged with rainbows.

On her right, Papa was also staring, but not with rapture, and not upward. Ali Lin was on his hands. He pretty much ignored the subtle hints of gravity as he poked at the pebble-textured surface the diggers had left in the diamond floor. “There’s nothing living here, nothing at all.” His face screwed up in a frown.

“It will be the largest park you’ve ever done, Papa. A blank slate for you to work on.” The frown eased.We’ll work on it together, Papa. You canteach me new things. This one should be big enough for real animals, maybe even the flying kittens. Those were more dream than memory, from the time Mama and Papa and Qiwi spent at the Trilander departure temp.

And Tomas said, “I’m so glad you pushed me on this, Qiwi. I just wanted a little better security and you’ve given me something wonderful.” He sighed, smiled down at her. His hand brushed down her back to just above her hips.

“It’ll be a large park, Tomas, even by Qeng Ho standards. Not the largest, but—”

“But it likely will be thebest. “ He leaned past her to pat Ali on the shoulder.

“Yes.” Yes, it likely will be the best. Papa had always been a premier parkbuilder. And now, for fifteen years of his lifetime he had been Focused on his specialty. Every year of that time had produced new wonders. His bonsais and microparks were already better than the finest of Namqem. Even the Focused Emergent biologists were as good as the Qeng Ho best, now that they had access to the fleet’s life library.

And when the Exile is over, Papa, when you are finally free, then youwill truly know what wonders you have made.

Nau’s glance swept back and forth across the empty, glittering cavern. He must be imaging some of the landscapes it might sustain—savannah, cool rain forest, meadowland in mountains. Even Ali’s magic couldn’t create more than one ecosystem at a time here, but there were choices…. She smiled: “How would you like a lake?”

“What?”

“Code ‘wetwater,’ in my design library.” And Qiwi keyed her own huds to the design.

“Unh… you didn’t tell me about this!”

Overlaid on the diamond reality of the cavern was one of Ali’s forestland schemes—but now the center of the cavern was a lake that widened and widened into the distance till it reached island mountains that seemed kilometers away. A sailboat had just cast off from the arbored moorage down the hill from them.

Tomas was silent for a moment. “Lord. That’s on my uncle’s estate at North Paw. I spent summers there.”

“I know. I got it from your biography.”

“It’s beautiful, Qiwi, even if it is impossible.”

“Not impossible! We’ve got lots of water topside; this will be a good secondary storage for some of it.” She waved at the distance, where the lake spread wide. “We dig out the far side of the cavern a little, and run the lake right out to the wall. We can scavenge enough wallpaper to make realistic far imagery.” That might not be true. The video wallpaper from the wrecked ships had suffered considerable vacuum damage. It didn’t matter. Tomas liked to wear huds, and they could paint the far scenery for anyone who did not participate in the imaging.

“That’s not what I mean. We can’t have a real lake, not in microgravity. Every little rockquake would send it crawling up the walls.”

Qiwi let her smile grow broad. “That’s the real surprise. I can do it, Tomas! We have thousands of servo valves from the wrecked starships, more than we can use for anything else. We put them at the bottom of the lake, and run them off a network of localizers. It would be easy to damp the water waves, keep the thing confined.”

Tomas laughed. “You really like stabilizing the intrinsically unstable, don’t you, Qiwi! Well… you did it for the rockpile, maybe you can do it here.”

She shrugged. “Sure I can. With a restricted shoreline, I could even do it with Emergent localizers.”

Tomas turned to look at her, and now she saw no visions before his eyes. He was back in the hard sterile world of the diamond cavern. But he had seen the wonder, and she knew she had pleased him. “It would be marvelous… a lot of resources, though, and a lot of work.” Work by non-zipheads, he meant. Even Tomas didn’t think of the Focused as real people.

“It won’t get in the way of important things. The valves are scrap. The localizers are surplus. And people owe me lots of favors.”

After a time, Nau led his woman and the ziphead back out of the cavern. Qiwi had surprised him once again, this time more spectacularly than usual. And damn. This was just another reason why they needed the localizers in Hammerfest. Reynolt’s people still hadn’t cleared the devices; just how complicated could that be?Leave it for later. Qiwi said they could get some kind of lake even with Emergent localizers.

They went back up through the lower levels, acknowledging the various salutes and waves of techs, both Emergent and former Qeng Ho. They dropped Ali Lin off in the garden park that was his workshop. Qiwi’s father wasn’t caged in the Attic honeycomb. In fact, his specialty demanded open spaces and living things. At least, that was how Tomas Nau presented the issue to Qiwi. It was plausible, and it meant the girl was not continually exposed to the usual face of Focused operations; that helped slow her inevitable slide toward understanding.

“You have to go over to the temp, Qiwi?”

“Yes, some errands. To see some friends.” Qiwi had her trades to accomplish, her favors to collect.

“Okay.” He swept her up in a kiss, visible the length of the office hall. No matter. “You did well, my love!”

“Thanks.” Her smile was a dazzling thing. Over thirty years old, and Qiwi Lisolet still hung on his approval. “See you this evening.”

She departed up the central shaft, pulling herself hand over hand faster and faster, all but rocketing past the other people in the shaft. Qiwi still practiced every day in a two-gee centrifuge, still practiced the martial killing arts. It was all that was left of her mother’s influence, at least all that was visible. No doubt a lot of her driving energy was some sort of sublimated effort to please her mother.

Nau looked up, almost oblivious of the people coming down around him; they would stay out of his way. He watched her figure dwindle into the heights of the main shaft.

After Anne Reynolt, Qiwi was his most precious possession. But he had essentially inherited Reynolt; Qiwi Lin Lisolet was his personal triumph, a brilliant, unFocused person, working unstintingly for him for all these years. Owning her, manipulating her—it was a challenge that never got stale. And there was always an edge of danger. She had the strength and speed, at least, to kill with her hands. He hadn’t understood that in the early years. But that was also before he had realized what a valuable thing she was.

Yes, she was his triumph, but Tomas Nau was realistic enough to know he’d been lucky, too. He had first possessed Qiwi at just the right age and context—when she was old enough to have absorbed a depth of Qeng Ho background, yet young enough to be molded by the Diem Massacre. In the first ten years of the Exile, she had seen through his lies only three times.

A little smile quirked his lips. Qiwi thought she was changinghim, that she had shown him how well the methods of freedom worked. Well, she was right. In the early years, allowing the underground economy had been part of the game he was playing with her, a temporary weakness. But the underground economy reallyworked. Even the Qeng Ho texts claimed that free markets should be meaningless in an environment as closed and limited as this. And yet, year by year, the Peddlers had made things better—even for operations that Nau would have required anyway. So now, when she assured him that people owed her favors, that they would work really hard to make the lake park—Pestilence, I really want that lake—Tomas Nau didn’t laugh behind his hand at her. She was right: the people—even the Emergents—would do better on that park because they owed Qiwi than they would because Tomas Nau was Podmaster with the ultimate power to space them all.

Qiwi was a tiny figure at the very top of the shaft. She turned and waved. Nau waved back, and she disappeared to the side, down one of the taxi access tunnels.

Nau stood a moment longer, staring upward with a smile on his face. Qiwi had taught him the power of managed freedom. Uncle Alan and the Nauly clique had bequeathed him the power of Focused slaves. And the OnOff star…? The more they learned of the star and its planet, the more he had the awed conviction that there were miracles hiding here, maybe not the treasures they had expected, but much greater things. The biology, the physics, the star system’s far galactic orbit… their combined implications were just beyond the analysts’ comprehension, teasing at his intuition.

And in a few years, the Spiders would hand him an industrial ecology with which to exploit it all.

There had never been a place and a time in the histories of Humankind where so much opportunity had come to one man. Twenty-five years ago, a younger Tomas Nau had quailed before the uncertainties. But the years had passed, and step by step he had met the problems and mastered them. What came out of Arachna would be the power of a dynasty like none Humankind had ever seen. It would take time, perhaps another century or two, but he would scarcely be out of Qeng Ho middle age by the end of it. He could sweep the Emergent cliques aside. This end of Human Space would see the greatest empire in all the histories. The legend of Pham Nuwen would pale in the light that Tomas Nau would cast.

And Qiwi? He cast a final look upward. He hoped she would last through the end of the Exile. There were so many things she could help him with when they took the Spiders down. But the mask was fraying. Mindscrub was not perfect; Qiwi was catching on faster than in the early years. Without destroying large amounts of brain tissue, Anne could not eliminate what she called “residual neural weighting.” And of course there were some contradictions that coldsleep amnesia could not plausibly cover. Eventually, even with the most skillful manipulation… How could he explain reneging on his promises of manumission? How could he explain the measures he would take against the Spiders, or the human breeding programs that would be necessary? No. Inevitably, but most regrettably, he would have to dispose of Qiwi. And yet, even then she could still serve him. Children by her would still be possible. Someday his reign would need heirs.

Qiwi pulled into Benny’s parlor about two thousand seconds later. And it was Benny running things this Watch. Good. He was her favorite master of the parlor. They dickered for a moment over the new gear he wanted. “Lord, Benny! You need more wallpaper? There are other projects that could use some, you know.” Like a certain park under Hammerfest.

Benny shrugged. “Get the Podmaster to allow consensual imaging, and I won’t need wallpaper. But the stuff just wears out. See?” He waved at the floor, where the image of Arachna was a permanent fixture. She could see a storm system that would probably reach Princeton in a few Ksecs; certainly the display drivers were still alive. But she could also see the distortions and the colored smudges.

“Okay, we still have some to strip out of theInvisible Hand, but it’ll cost you.” Ritser Brughel would froth and shriek, even though he had no use for the wallpaper. Ritser regarded theHand as his private fiefdom. She looked at Benny’s handwritten list, at the other items. The finished foods were all from the temp’s bactry and ags—Gonle Fong would want to handle that. Volatiles and feedstock, aha. As usual, Benny was negotiating on the side for those, trying to short-circuit Gonle by going directly to the mining operation on the rockpile. For best friends, the two took their business competition awfully seriously.

At the edge of her vision, something moved. She glanced up. Over by the ceiling, Xin’s gang was hanging out in its usual place. Ezr! An involuntary smile spread across Qiwi’s face. He had turned from the others, was looking in her direction. She waved to him. Ezr’s face seemed to close down, and he turned away. For a moment, a lot of old pain floated up in Qiwi’s mind. Even now, when she saw him, there was always this quick, involuntary twinge of joy, like seeing a dear friend you have so much to say to. But the years had passed, and every time he turned away. She hadn’t meant to harm Trixia Bonsol; she helped Tomas because he was a good man, a man who was doing his best to bring them through the Exile.

She wondered if Ezr would ever let her close enough to explain. Maybe. There were years to come. At Exile’s end, when they had a whole civilization to help them and Trixia was returned to him—surely then he would forgive.

THIRTY-SIX

The space between the temp’s outer skin and the habitable balloons was a buffer against blowouts. Over the years, various of Gonle Fong’s farming rackets had used the space; a pressure loss would have killed some truffles or her experiments with Canberra flowers. Even now, Fong’s ags occupied only a part of the dead space. Pham met Ezr Vinh well away from the little farm plots. Here the air was still and cold, and the only light was OnOff’s dim glow seeping through the outer wall.

Pham hooked his foot under a wall stop and waited quietly. Earlier in the Watch, he had made sure that these volumes were well populated with localizers. They were scattered here and there on the walls. A few always floated in the air around him, though even in bright light they would have been scarcely more than dustmotes. And so, hiding here in the twilight, Pham was a one-man command post. He could hear and see from wherever he commanded—just now, the airgap between the balloons. Someone was approaching cautiously. At the back of his eyes he had vision now, almost as good as Qeng Hohuds. It was the Vinh boy, looking nervous and stealthy.

How old was Vinh now, thirty? Not really a kid anymore. But he still had that cast to his features, that serious manner… just like Sura. Not a person to trust, oh no. But hopefully a person he could use.

Vinh appeared to the naked eye, coming around the curve of the inner balloon. Pham raised a hand and the boy stopped, sucked in a breath of surprise. For all his caution, Vinh had almost passed Pham by, not noticing him floating in the inward notch of the wall fabric. “I—Hello.” Vinh was whispering.

Pham floated out from the wall, to where the light of OnOff was a little better. “We meet at last,” he said, giving the boy a lopsided smile.

“Y-yes. Truly.” Ezr turned, looked at him for a long moment, and then gave—Lord!—a little bow. His Sura features spread into a shy smile. “It’s strange to actually see you, not Pham Trinli.”

“Hardly a visible difference.”

“Oh sir, you don’t know. When you are Trinli, all the little things are different. Here, even in this light, you look different. If Nau or Reynolt saw you for even ten seconds, they would know, too.”

The kid had an overactive imagination. “Well, the only thing they’re seeing for the next two thousand seconds is the lies my localizers are feeding them. Hopefully, that’s long enough to get you started—”

“Yes! You can actually see with the localizers, you can actually input commands to them?”

“With enough practice.” He showed the boy where to set localizer grains around the orbit of his eye, and how to cue the nearby localizers to cooperate. “Don’t do that in public. The synthesized beam is very narrow, but might still be noticed.”

Vinh stared as if sightless. “Ah, it’s like something is nibbling at the back of my eyes.”

“The localizers are tickling your optic nerve directly. What pops up may be very weird at first. You can learn the commands with some simple exercises, but learning to make sense of the visual tickle… well, I guess that’s like learning to see again.” Pham guessed it was a lot like a blind man learning to use a visual prosthesis. Some people could do it, some remained blind. He didn’t say that out loud. Instead, he led Ezr through some test patterns, patterns that Vinh could practice with.

Pham had thought a lot about just how much of the command interface to show the Vinh boy. But Ezr already knew enough to betray him. Short of killing him, there was no cure for that.All the bloody clues I laid, pointingat the Zamle Eng story, and he still picked up on the truth. Pray it was only his Great Family background that made that possible. Pham had kept him in ignorance for years now, watching for signs of counterscheming, trying to measure the boy’s actual ability. What he had seen was a compulsive, unsure adolescent coming of age in a tyranny—and still retaining some sense.

When the crunch came, when Pham finally moved against Nau and Brughel, he would need someone to help pull all the strings. The boy should be taught some of the tricks… but there were nights Pham ground his teeth, thinking of the power he was handing to a Vinh.

Ezr learned the command set very quickly. Now he should have no trouble learning the other techniques that Pham had opened for him. Full vision would come slowly, but—

“Yes, I know you still can’t see more than flashes of light. Just keep trying the test patterns. In a few Msecs, you’ll be as good as I am.” Almost as good.

Just the assurance seemed to calm the boy. “Okay, I’ll practice and practice—all in my room, as you say. This makes me feel… I don’t know, like I’ve accomplished more just now than I have in years.”

One hundred seconds of the alloted time remained. The masking that disguised them to the snoops couldn’t be aborted. Never mind. Just react to the kid naturally. Platitudes. “You did plenty in the past. Together, we’ve learned a lot about the Hammerfest operation.”

“Yes, but this will be different…. What will things be like after we win, sir?”

“Afterwards?” What not to say? “It will be… magnificent. We will have Qeng Ho technology and a planetary civilization very nearly capable of using it. By itself, that is the most powerful trading position any Qeng Ho has ever had. But we will have more. Given time, we’ll have ramdrives that take advantage of what we’ve learned from OnOff’s physics. And you know the DNA diversity on Arachna. That by itself is an enormous treasure, a box of surprises that could power—”

“And all the Focused will be set free.”

“Yes, yes. Of course. Don’t worry, Vinh, we’ll get Trixia back.” That was an expensive promise, but one Pham intended to keep. With Trixia Bonsol free, maybe Vinh would listen to reason about the rest. Maybe.

Pham realized that the boy was looking at him strangely; he had let the silence stretch into unwelcome implications. “Okay. I think we’ve covered the ground. Practice the input language and the visual test patterns. For now, our time is up.” Thank the Lord of All Trade. “You take off first, back the way you came. The cover story is you got almost to the taxi port, then decided to go back to the dayroom for breakfast.”

“Okay.” Vinh hesitated an instant, as if wanting to say more. Then he turned and floated back around the curve of the inner balloon.

Pham watched the timer that hung at the back of his vision. In twenty seconds, he would depart in the other direction. The localizers had fed two thousand seconds of carefully planned lies back to Brughel’s snoops. Later, Pham would check it over for consistency with what was really going on throughout the rest of the temp. There would be some patching necessary, no doubt. This kind of meeting would have been easy if the enemy had been ordinary analysts. With ziphead snoops, covering your ass was a major exercise in paranoia.

Ten seconds. He stared into the dimness at where Ezr Vinh had just disappeared. Pham Nuwen had a lifetime of experience in diplomacy and deception.So why the bloody hell wasn’t I smoother with the kid? The ghost of Sura Vinh seemed suddenly very close, and she was laughing.

“You know, we really need to get localizers aboard Hammerfest.” The request had become a ritual at the beginning of Ritser Brughel’s security briefings. Today, maybe Ritser was in for a surprise.

“Anne’s people haven’t finished their evaluation.”

The Vice-Podmaster leaned forward. Over the years, Ritser had changed more than most. Nowadays, he was on-Watch almost fifty percent, but he was also making heavy use of medical support and the Hammerfest gym. He actually looked healthier than he had during the early years. And somewhere along the way, he had learned to satisfy his… needs… without producing an unending stream of dead zipheads. He had grown to be a dependable Podmaster. “Have you seen Reynolt’s latest report, sir?”

“Yes. She’s saying five more years.” Anne’s search for security holes in the Peddler localizers was close to impossible. In the early years, Tomas had been more hopeful. After all, the Qeng Ho security hackers had had no ziphead support. But the quagmire of Qeng Ho software was almost eight thousand years deep. Every year, Anne’s zipheads pushed back their deadline for certainty another year or two. And now this latest report.

“Five more years, sir. She might as well be saying ‘never.’ We both know how unlikely it is that these localizers are a danger. My zipheads have been using them for twelve years on the temp and in the junked starships. My zips aren’t programmer specialists, but I’ll tell you, in all that time the localizers have come up as clean as anything Qeng Ho. These gadgets are so useful, sir. Nothing gets past them.Not using them has its own risks.”

“Such as?”

Nau saw the other’s faint start of surprise; this was more encouragement than Ritser had received in some time. “Um. Such as the things we miss because we aren’t using them. Let’s just look at the current briefing.” There followed a not-too-relevant discourse on all the recent security concerns: Gonle Fong’s attempts to acquire automation for her black-market farms; the perverse affection people of all factions had developed for the Spiders—a desirable sublimation, but a potential problem when the time for real action finally arrived; the proper level for Anne’s paranoia. “I know you monitor her, sir, but I think she’s drifting. It’s not just this fixation about system trapdoors. She’s become significantly more possessive of ‘her’ zipheads.”

“It’s possible I’ve tuned her too edgy.” Anne’s suspicions about sabotaged zipheads were totally amorphous, quite unlike her usual analytical precision. “But what does that have to do with enabling localizers in Hammerfest?”

“With localizer support in Hammerfest, my snoops could do constant, fine-grain analysis—correlate the net traffic with exactly what is happening physically. It’s… it’s a scandal that our weakest security is in the place where we need the strongest.”

“Hmm.” He looked back into Ritser’s eyes. As a child, Tomas Nau had learned an important rule: Whatever else, never lie to yourself. Throughout history, self-deception had ruined great men from Helmun Dire to Pham Nuwen. Be honest: He reallyreally wanted the lake that Qiwi had shown him under Hammerfest. With such a park, he would have made something of this squalor, a splendor that the Qeng Ho rarely exceeded even in civilized systems. All that was no excuse to break security—but maybe his self-denial was itself making things worse.Take a different tack: Whoappears to be pushing this? Ritser Brughel was awfully enthusiastic about it. He must not be underestimated. Less directly, Qiwi had created this dilemma: “What about Qiwi Lisolet, Ritser? What do your analysts say about her?”

Something glittered in Ritser’s eyes. He still held a homicidal hatred for Qiwi. “We both know how fast she can twig the truth—close surveillance is more important than ever. But at the moment, she’s absolutely, totally clean. She doesn’t love you, but her admiration for you is nearly as strong as love. She is a masterpiece, sir.”

Qiwi was twigging about every other Watch now. But her last scrubbing was very recent—and extending the localizer coverage would keep her under an even tighter watch. Nau thought it over for a moment more, then nodded. “Okay, Vice-Podmaster, let’s bring the localizers to Hammerfest.”

Of course, the Qeng Ho localizers were already aboard Hammerfest. The dustlike motes spread on air currents, stuck to clothes and hair and even skin. They were ubiquitous throughout all inhabited spaces around the rockpile.

Ubiquitous they might be, but without power the localizers were harmless pieces of metallic glass. Now Anne’s people reprogrammed Hammerfest’s cable spines—and extended them into the newly dug caves beneath. Now, ten times a second, microwaves pulsed in every open space. The energy was far below biological-damage thresholds, so low that it didn’t interfere with the other utilities in place. The Qeng Ho localizers didn’t need much power, just enough to run their tiny sensors and communicate with their nearest neighbors. Ten Ksec after the microwave pulses were turned on, Ritser reported that the net had stabilized and was providing good data. Millions of processors, scattered across a diameter of four hundred meters. Each was scarcely more powerful than a Dawn Age computer. In principle, they were the most powerful computer net at L1.

In four days, Qiwi finished digging out the cave, and emplaced the wave servos. Her father was already brewing soil on the uplands. The water would come last, but it would come.

After the fact, Nau wondered how they had managed without the localizers all this time. Ritser Brughel had been absolutely correct. Before, their security had been all but blind in Hammerfest. Before, the Qeng Ho temp had in fact been a safer place for secure operations. Nau supervised Brughel and his snoops in a thorough, many-day sweep of all Hammerfest, and then of the starships and the warehouse cloud. He even broke with tradition and ran the localizers for 100Ksec in the L1-A arsenal vault. It was like shining a spotlight into dark places. They found and closed dozens of security lapses… and found not a single trace of subversion. Altogether, the experience was a wonderful confidence builder, as when you check for house parasites, find none, but also see where to put poison and barriers against future infestation.

And now, Tomas Nau had greater knowledge of his own domain than any Podmaster in Emergent history. Ritser’s snoops, using the localizers, could give Nau the location and emotional state—even cognitive state—of anyone in Hammerfest. After a time, he realized that there were experiments he should have undertaken long before.

Ezr Vinh. Maybe something more could be done with him. Nau studied the fellow’s biography again. At the next briefing, he was ready. This was Vinh’s standard meeting time. It was just the two of them, but by this time the Peddler was very used to the interaction. Vinh showed up at Nau’s office to discuss his summaries for the last ten days, the progress he was seeing with the ziphead groups in their understanding of the Spider world.

Tomas let the Peddler rattle on. He listened, nodded, asked the reasonable questions… and watched the analysis that spread across his huds.Lordy. The localizers in the air, on Vinh’s chair, even on his skin, reported to theInvisible Hand, where programs analyzed and sent the results back to Nau’s huds, painting Vinh’s skin with colors that showed galvanic response, skin temperature, perspiration. Standard graphics around the face showed pulse and other internals. An inset window showed what Vinh was seeing from his place across the desk, and mapped his every eye motion with red tracks. Two of Brughel’s snoops were allocated to this interview, and their analysis was a flowing legend across the top of Nau’s vision.Subject is relaxed to tenth percentile of normal interview level. Subject isconfident but wary, without sympathy for the Podmaster. Subject is not currently trying to suppress explicit thought.

It was more or less what Nau would have guessed, but with a wealth of added detail, better than the best instrumented soft interrogation, since it was invisible to the subject.

“So the strategic politics are much clearer now,” concluded Vinh, blissfully unaware of the dual nature of the interview. “Pedure and the Kindred have some real advantages in rocketry and nuclear weapons, but they’ve consistently lagged behind the Accord in computing and networks.”

Nau shrugged. “The Kindred are a strict dictatorship. Haven’t you told me that the Dawn Age tyrannies couldn’t cope with computer networks?”

“Yes.” Subject reacts, suppressing probable feeling of irony. “That’s part of it. We know they’re planning on a first strike sometime after the sun goes out, so that accounts for their overspending on weapons. And on the Accord side, Sherkaner Underhill is justso enthusiastic about automation that Pedure can’t keep up. Frankly, I think we’re headed for a crunch, Podmaster.” The subject is sincere in this statement. “Spider civilization only discovered the inverse square law a couple of generations ago; their mathematics lagged behind our Dawn Age accordingly. But the Kindred have made solid progress in rocketry. If they show one-tenth the curiosity of Sherkaner Underhill, they’re going to detect us in less than ten years.”

“Before we can completely control their networks?”

“Yes, sir.”

That’s what Jau Xin had been saying, reasoning off of his pilot zipheads. A pity. But at least the shape of the end of the Exile was becoming clear…. Meantime:

Subject’s guard is down. Nau smiled to himself. This was as good a time as any to shake up Manager Vinh.Who knows, maybe I can actually manipulate him. Either way, Vinh’s reaction would be interesting. Nau leaned back in his chair, pretended to gaze idly at the bonsai floating over his desk. “I’ve had years to study the Qeng Ho, Mr. Vinh. I’m not under false illusions. You people understand the different ways of civilization better than any sessile group.”

“Yes, sir.” Subject still calm, but the comment brings sincere agreement.

Nau cocked his head. “You’re in the Vinh line; if any in the Qeng Ho really understand things, it should be you. You see, one of my personal heroes has always been Pham Nuwen.”

“You’ve… mentioned that before.” The words were wooden. In Nau’s display, Vinh’s face was transformed by color, his pulse and perspiration spiking. Somewhere over on the Hand, the snoops analyzed, and reported: Subject feels substantial anger directed at the Podmaster. “Honestly, Mr. Vinh, I’m not trying to insult your traditions. You know that Emergents hold much of the Qeng Ho culture in contempt, but Pham Nuwen is a different matter. You see… I know the truth about Pham Nuwen.”

The diagnostic colors were shading toward normalcy, as was Vinh’s heart rate. His eye dilation and tracking were consistent with suppressed anger. Nau felt a fleeting incongruity; he would have read a tinge of fear in Vinh’s reaction.Maybe I have some things to learn from all this automation. And now he was frankly puzzled: “What’s the matter, Mr. Vinh? For once, let’s be frank.” He smiled. “I won’t tell Ritser, and you won’t gossip with Xin or Liao or… my Qiwi.”

The pulse of anger was very stark on that one, no disagreement there. The Peddler was hung up on Qiwi Lisolet, even if he couldn’t admit it to himself.

The signs of anger receded. Vinh licked his lips, a gesture that might have been nervousness. But the glyphs across the top of Nau’s huds said,Subject is curious. Vinh said, “It’s just that I don’t see the similarities between Pham Nuwen’s life and Emergent values. Sure, Pham Nuwen was not born a Peddler, but more than anyone he made us what we are today. Look at the Qeng Ho archives, his life—”

“Oh, I have. They’re a bit scattered, don’t you think?”

“Well, he was the great traveler. I doubt he ever cared much about the historians.”

“Mr. Vinh, Pham Nuwen valued the regard of history as much as any of the giants. I think—Iknow —your Qeng Ho archives have been carefully gardened, probably by your own Family. But you see, someone as great as Pham Nuwen attracted other historians—from the worlds he changed, from other spacefaring cultures. Their stories also float across the ages, and I’ve collected all that passed through this end of Human Space. He is a man I have always tried to emulate. Your Pham Nuwen was no lickspittle trader. Pham Nuwen was a Bringer of Order, a conqueror. Sure, he used your Trader techniques, the deception and the bribery. But he never shrank from threats and raw violence when that was necessary.”

“I—” The diagnostics painted an exquisite combination of anger and surprise and doubt across Vinh’s face, just the mix that Nau would have estimated.

“I can prove it, Mr. Vinh.” He spoke key words into the air. “I’ve just transferred some ofour archives to your personal domain. Take a look. These are unvarnished, non–Qeng Ho views of the man. A dozen little atrocities. Read the true story of how he ended the Strentmannian Pogrom, of how he was betrayed at Brisgo Gap. Then let’s talk again.”

Amazing. Nau had not intended to speak so bluntly, but the evoked effects were so interesting. They exchanged a few meaningless sentences, and the meeting was over. Red shimmered around Vinh’s hands, symptoms of an invisible trembling, as he approached the door.

Nau sat quietly for a moment after the Peddler was gone. He stared off into the distance, but in fact he was reading from his huds. The snoops’ report was a stream of colored glyphs against the landscape of Diamond One. He would read the report carefully… later. First, there were his own thoughts to get in order. The localizer diagnostics were almost magical. Without them, he knew he would have scarcely noticed Vinh’s agitation.More important, without the diagnostics I wouldn’t have been able to guidethe conversation, zeroing in on the topics that needled Vinh. So yes, active manipulation did appear feasible; this wasn’t simply a snoop technique. And now he knew that Ezr Vinh had some substantial portion of his self-image bound up in the Qeng Ho fairy tales. Could the boy actually be turned by a different vision of those stories? Before now, he never would have believed it. With these new tools, maybe…

THIRTY-SEVEN

“We should have another face-to-face talk.”

“…Okay. Look, Pham. I don’t believe these lies that Nau dumped on me.”

“Yeah, well everyone gets to write their own version of the past. The main thing is, I want to give you some drill about handling that sort of ambush interview.”

“I’m sorry. For a few seconds, I thought he was on to us.” The boy’s voice was faint in Pham’s ear. Ezr Vinh had become quite good with their secret comm link; good enough that Pham could hear the stunned tone in his voice.

“You did okay, though. You’ll do better with some feedback training.” They talked a few moments more, setting up a time and a cover story. Then the tenuous link was broken, and Pham was left to think on the day’s events.

Damn.Today had been a disaster just barely avoided… or just temporarily avoided. Pham floated in the darkened room, but his vision flitted across the gap of kilometers, to Diamond One and Hammerfest. The localizers were everywhere there now, and they were operational—though the MRI units in the Focus clinic fried any nearby localizers almost immediately. Getting live localizers onto Hammerfest was the breakthrough he had waited years for, but—If I hadn’t meddled with the diagnostics coming offVinh, we could have lost everything.Pham had known how the Podmaster might use his new toys; similar, if less intense, things had been going on in the temp for years. What he hadn’t guessed was that Nau would have such deadly good luck in his choice of words. For nearly ten seconds, the boy had been sure that Nau had figured out everything. Pham had damped the snoops’ report on that reaction, and Vinh himself had covered for it pretty well, but…

I never thought that Tomas Nau would know so much about me.Over the years, the Podmaster had often claimed to be a great admirer of “the historical giants,” and he always included Pham Nuwen on his list. It had always seemed a transparent attempt to establish a common ground with the Qeng Ho. But now, Pham wasn’t sure. While Tomas Nau had been busy “reading” Ezr Vinh, Pham had run similar diagnostics on the Podmaster. Tomas Nau reallydid admire his notion of the historical Pham Nuwen! Somehow, the monster thought he and Pham Nuwen were alike.He calledme a “Bringer of Order.” That rang a strange resonance. Though Pham had never thought to use the term, it was almost what he wished of himself.Butwe are nothing alike. Tomas Nau kills and kills and it is for himself. All Iever wanted was an end to killing, an end to barbarism. We are different! Pham stuffed the absurdity back in its bottle. The really amazing thing was that Nau had so much of the true story. For the last 10Ksec, Pham had watched over Vinh’s shoulder as the boy read through much of it. Even now, he was trickling the whole database out of Vinh’s domain and into the distributed memory of the localizer net. Over the next Msec, he would study the whole thing.

What he had seen so far was… interesting. Much of it was even true. But whether truth or lie, it was not the awed mythology that Sura Vinh had left in the Qeng Ho histories. It was not the lie that covered Sura’s ultimate treachery.And how will Ezr Vinh take it? Pham had already been much too open with Vinh. Vinh was totally inflexible about Focus; he just wouldn’t stop whining about the zipheads. It was strange. In his life, Pham had blithely lied to crazies and villains and Customers and even Qeng Ho… but playing up to Vinh’s obsession left him exhausted. Vinh just didn’t understand the miracle that Focus could make.

And there were things in Nau’s archive that would make it very difficult for Pham to disguise his true goals from the boy.

Pham dipped back into Nau’s version of history, followed one story and then another, swore at the lies that made him out to be a monster… winced when the story was the truth, even if his actions had been the best he could do. It was strange to see his real face again. Some of these videos had to be real. Pham could almost feel the words of those speeches flowing up his throat and out his lips. It brought back memories: the high years, when almost every destination had brought him into contact with Traders who understood what could be made of an interstellar trading culture. Radio had outpaced him and delivered his message with good effect. And less than a thousand years after Little Prince Pham had been given away to the traveling merchants, his life plan was close to success. The idea of a true Qeng Ho had spread across most of Human Space. From worlds on the Far Side that he might never know, to the tilled and retilled heart of Human Space—even on Old Earth—they had heard his message, they had seen his vision of an organization durable enough and powerful enough to stop the wheel of fate. Yes, many of them saw nothing more than Sura had. These were the “practical minds,” only interested in making great wealth, insuring the benefit to themselves and their Families. But Pham had thought then—and Lord, I still want to believe now—that the majority believed in the greater goal that Pham himself preached.

Across a thousand years of real time, Pham had left the message, the plan for a Meeting more spectacular than any meeting before, a place and a time where the new Qeng Ho would declare the Peace of Human Space, would agree to serve that cause. It had been Sura Vinh who set the place:

Namqem.

True, Namqem was well on the coreward side of Human Space, but it was near the center of heavy Qeng Ho activity. The Traders who could most certainly participate were in relatively easy reach; they would need less than one thousand years of lead time. Those were the reasons that Sura said. And all the time she smiled her old disbelieving smile, as if humoring poor Pham. But Pham had believed he would be given his chance at Namqem.

In the end, there was another reason for agreeing to meet at Namqem. Sura had traveled so little; she had always been the planner at the center of Pham’s schemes. Decades and centuries had passed. Even with occasional coldsleep and the best medical technology in all Human Space, Sura Vinh was now insupportably old, five hundred years of life? six hundred? In the last century before the Meeting, her messages made her seem so very old. If they didn’t have the Meeting at Namqem, maybe Sura would never see the success of what Pham had worked for. Maybe Sura would never see how Pham was right.She was the only one I totally trusted. I setmyself up for her.

And Pham drowned in an old, old rage, remembering….

The mother of all meetings. In a sense, the entire method and mythology that Pham and Sura had invented had been dedicated to this single moment. So it wasn’t surprising that the arrivals were timed with unprecedented precision. Instead of trickling in over a decade or two, five thousand ramscoops from more than three hundred worlds were falling inward toward the Namqem system, all to arrive within an Msec of one another.

Some had left port less than a century earlier, coming in from Canberra and Torma. There were ships from Strentmann and Kielle, from worlds with ethnicities that by now were almost different species. Some had launched from so far away that they had only heard of the Meeting by radio. There were three ships from Old Earth. Not all the Attendees were true Traders; some were government missions hoping for the solutions in Pham’s message. Perhaps a third of the visitors’ departure worlds would have fallen from civilization in the time it took for voyage and return.

Such a meeting could not be moved or postponed. The opening of Hell itself could not successfully deflect it. Still, decades out from port, Pham had known that Hell was cracking open for the people of Namqem.

Pham’s Flag Captain was only forty years old. He had seen a dozen worlds, and he should have known better. But he had been born on Namqem. “They’ve been civilized since before you first showed up out of the Dark, sir. They know how to make things work. How can this be?” He looked disbelievingly at the analysis that had arrived with Sura Vinh’s latest transmission.

“Sit down, Sammy.” Pham kicked a chair out from the wall, gestured for the other to settle himself. “I’ve read the reports, too. The symptoms are classic. The last decade, the rate of system deadlocks has steadily increased throughout Namqem. See here, thirty percent of business commuting between the outer moons is in locked state at any given time.” All the hardware was in working order, but the system complexity was so great that vehicles could not get the go-ahead.

Sammy Park was one of Pham’s best. He understood the reasons behind all the synthetic beliefs of the new Qeng Ho—and he still embraced them. He could make a worthy successor to Pham and Sura—maybe better than Pham’s oldest children, who were often as cautious as their mother. But Sammy was seriously rattled: “Surely the governance of Namqem understands the danger? They know everything Humankind has ever learned about stability—and they have better automation than we! Surely, in another few dozen Msecs we’ll hear that they’ve reoptimized.”

Pham shrugged, not admitting to his own disbelief.Namqem was sogood, for so long. Aloud he said, “Maybe. But we know they’ve had thirty years to work a fix.” He waved at Sura’s report. “And still the problems get worse.” He saw the look on Park’s face, and softened his voice. “Sammy, Namqem has had peace and freedom for almost four thousand years. There’s not another Customer civilization in all Human Space that can say that. But that’s the point. Without help, even they can’t go on forever.”

Sammy’s shoulders hunched down. “They’ve avoided the killing disasters. They haven’t had war plagues or nuclear war. The governance is still flexible and responsive. There are just these Lord-be-damned technical problems.”

“They are technical symptoms, Sammy, of problems I’m sure the governance understands very well.” And can’t do a thing about. He remembered back to the cynicism of Gunnar Larson. In a way this conversation was rumbling down the same dead-end street. But Pham Nuwen had had a lifetime to think of solutions. “The flexibility of the governance is its life and its death. They’ve accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point….”

“But we knew—I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins.”

Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still—“In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand.” If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

“Okay, I know.” Sammy looked away, and Pham synched his huds to follow what the younger man was seeing: Tarelsk and Marest, the two largest moons. Two billion people on each. They were gleaming disks of city lights as they slid across the face of their mother world—which itself was the largest park in Human Space. When the end finally came to Namqem, it would be a steep, swift collapse. Namqem solar system was not as naturally desolate as the pure asteroidal colonies of the early days of the Space Age… but the megalopolis moons required high technology to sustain their billions. Large failures there could easily spread into a system-wide war. It was the sort of debacle that had sterilized more than one of Humankind’s homes. Sammy watched the scene, peaceful and wondrous—and now years out-of-date. And then he said, “I know. This is everything you’ve been telling people, all the years I’ve been with the Qeng Ho. And for centuries before. Sorry Pham. I always believed… I just never thought my own birthplace would die, so soon.”

“I… wonder.” Pham looked across the command deck of his flag vessel and, in smaller windows, the command decks of the other thirty ships in his fleet. Here in midvoyage, there were only three or four people on each bridge. It was the dullest work in the universe. But the Nuwen fleet was one of the largest coming to the Meeting. More than ten thousand Qeng Ho slept in the holds of his ships. They had departed Terneu just over a century ago, and flew in the closest formation that wouldn’t interfere with their ramfields. The farthest command deck was less than four thousand light-seconds from Pham’s flag. “We’re still twenty years’ travel time from Namqem. That’s a lot of time if we choose to spend it on-Watch. Maybe… this is an opportunity to prove that what I’ve been talking about can actually work. Namqem will likely be chaos by the time we arrive. But we are help from outside their planetary trap, and we are arriving in enough numbers to make a difference.”

They were sitting on the command deck of Sammy’s ship, theFarRegard. This bridge was almost busy, with five of the thirty command posts occupied. Sammy looked from post to post, and finally back at Pham Nuwen. Something like hope was spreading across his face. “Yes… the whole reason for the Meeting can beillustrated. “ On the side he was running scheduling programs, already caught up in the idea. “If we use contingency supplies, we can support almost a hundred on-Watch per ship, all the way to Namqem. That’s enough to study the situation, come up with action plans. Hell, in twenty years, we should be able to coordinate with the other fleets, too.”

Sammy Park was all Flag Captain now. He stared into his calculations, twiddling the possibilities. “Yes. The Old Earth fleet is less than a quarter light-year from us. Half of all the Attendees are less than six light-years from us now, and of course that distance is decreasing. What about Sura and the Qeng Ho already in-system?”

Sura had put down roots over the centuries, but “Sura and company have their own resources. She’ll survive.” Sura understood the wheel of fate, even if she didn’t believe it could be broken. She had moved her headquarters off Tarelsk a century before; Sura’s “temp” was a hoary palace in the asteroid belt. She would guess what Pham was about to try. The wave front of her analysis was probably headed in their direction even now. Maybe there really was a Lord of All Trade. There was certainly an Invisible Hand. The Meeting at Namqem would mean more than even he had imagined.

Year on year, the fleet of fleets converged upon Namqem. Five thousand threads of light, fire flies visible across light-years—thousands of light-years to decent telescopes. Year on year, the flares of their deceleration became tighter, a fine ball of thistledown in the windows of every arriving ship.

Five thousand ships; more than a million human beings. The ships held machines that could slag worlds. The ships held libraries and computer nets…. And all together they were not a puff of thistledown compared to the power and resources of a civilization like Namqem. How could a puff of thistledown save a falling colossus? Pham had preached his answer to that question in person and across the Qeng Ho network. Local civilizations are all isolated traps. A simple disaster could kill them, but a little outside help might lead them to safety. And for the nonsimple cases—like Namqem—where generations of clever optimization finally crushed itself, even those disasters depended on the closed-system nature of sessile civilizations. A governance had too few choices, too many debts, and in the end it would be swept away by barbarism. An outside view, a new automation, that was something the Qeng Ho could supply. That was what Pham claimed would make the difference. Now he was going to get a chance to prove his point, not just argue it. Twenty years was not too much time to get ready.

In twenty years, Namqem’s once gentle decline had gone beyond inconvenience, beyond economic recession. The governance had fallen three times now, each time replaced by a regime designed to be “more effective”—each time opening the way to more radical social and technical fixes, ideas that had failed on a hundred other worlds. And with each downward step, the plans of the approaching fleets became more precise.

People were dying now. A billion kilometers out from Namqem world, the fleets saw the beginnings of Namqem’s first war. Literally saw it with their naked eyes: the explosions were in the gigatonne range, the destruction of a competing governance that had seceded with two-thirds of the outer planets’ automated industry. After the detonations, only one-third of that industry remained, but it was firmly in control of the megalopolitan regimes.

Flag Captain Sammy Park reported at a meeting: “Alqin is trying to evacuate to the planetary surface. Maresk is on the verge of starvation; the pipeline from the outer system will empty out just a few days before we arrive.”

“The stump governance on Tarelsk seems to think they’re still running a going concern. Here is our analysis….” The new speaker’s Nese was fluent; they had had twenty years now to synch their common language. This Fleet Captain was a young… man… from Old Earth. In eight thousand years, Old Earth had been depopulated four times. Without the existence of the daughter worlds, the human race would have gone extinct there long ago. What lived on Earth was strange now. None of their kind had been this far out from the center of Human Space before. But now, as fleets made their final approach into the Namqem system, the Old Earth ships were barely ten light-seconds from Pham’s flag. They had participated as much as anyone in setting up what they all were calling the Rescue.

Sammy waited politely to be sure the other was finished. Chatting at many seconds’ remove took a special discipline. Then he nodded. “Tarelsk will probably be the site of the first megadeaths, though we’re not sure of the precise cause.”

Pham was sitting in the same meeting room as Sammy. He took advantage of his location to butt in before the other’s time slot was truly ended. “Give us your summary on Sura’s situation, Sammy.”

“Trader Vinh is still in the main asteroid belt. She is about two thousand light-seconds from our present location.” It would still be a while before Sura could participate firsthand. “She’s supplied a lot of useful background intelligence, but she’s lost her temp and many of her ships.” Sura owned a number of estates in the belt; no doubt she was safe for the moment. “She recommends we shift the venue of the Grand Meeting to Brisgo Gap.”

Seconds drifted slowly past as they waited for comment from farther out. Twenty seconds. Nothing from the Old Earth fleet; but that could be politeness. Forty seconds. The Strentmannian Fleet Captain took the floor, naturally enough a woman: “Never heard of it. Brisgo Gap?” She held up her hand, indicating she was not giving up her speaking slot. “Okay, I see. A density-wave feature in their asteroid belt.” She gave a sour laugh. “I suppose that’s a place that won’t be subject to contention. Very well, we could pick a longitude close to Trader Vinh’s holdings and all meet there… after we accomplish the Rescue.”

They had come across dozens, some of them hundreds, of light-years. And now their Grand Meeting would be in empty space. As best he could across the time delay between them, Pham had argued with Sura about this suggestion. Meeting in a nowhere place was a confession of failure. When theFar Regard ’s speaking turn came, Pham took the floor. “Sure, Trader Vinh is right in picking an out-of-the-way corner of the Namqem system for the Meeting. But we’ve had years to plan for the Rescue. We have our five thousand ships. We have action strategies for each of the megalopolis populations and for those already moved down to Namqem world. I agree with Fleet Captain Tansolet. I propose that we execute our plan before we meet at this wherever-it-is gap.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

There was a war on. Three separate megalopolitan populations were at risk. The resources of almost a thousand ships were dedicated to suppressing the ragtag military that had grown up in the chaos. The lander resources of two hundred ships were sent down to the surface of Namqem itself. The world had been a manicured park for several thousand years—but now it would become the home of billions. Part of one megalopolis population was already down on the surface.

More than two thousand ships were headed for Maresk. The regime there was almost nonexistent… but starvation was only a few Msecs away. Much of Maresk might be saved by a combination of subtlety and brute cargo-hauling power.

Tarelsk still had an active governance, but it was like no governance in the history of the Namqem system. This was something out of darker times on other worlds, when rulers mouthed words about reconciliation—and willingly killed by the millions. The Tarelsk governance was an unplumbed madness.

One of Sammy’s analysts said, “Beating them down will be almost like an armed conquest.”

“Almost?” Pham looked up from the approach plots; every crewman was wearing full-press coveralls and hoods. “Hell, this is the real thing.” In the simplest case, the Qeng Ho rescue mission was three coordinated coups. If they succeeded, it would not be remembered that way. If they succeeded, each operation would be a little miracle, salvation that the locals could not provide for themselves. Perhaps ten times in all the histories had there been real interstellar war across more than a couple of light-years. Pham wondered what his father would have thought if he could have known what his throwaway son would one day accomplish. He turned back to the approach plots. The fastest would take 50Ksec to reach Tarelsk. “What’s the latest?”

“As expected, the Tarelsk governance isn’t buying our arguments. They consider us invaders, not rescuers. And they aren’t forwarding what we say to the Tarelsk population.”

“Surely the people know, though?”

“Maybe not. We’ve had three successful flybys.” The robots had been dropped off 4Msec before, recon darts that could make almost one-tenth lightspeed. “We only got a millisecond look, but what we saw is consistent with what Sura’s spies are telling us. We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.”

Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child’s rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. “So now they have to run everything.” The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind…. The only trouble was, no despot had the resources to plan every detail in his society’s behavior. Not even planet-wrecker bombs had as dire a reputation for eliminating civilizations. The rulers of Tarelsk had regressed far indeed. Pham leaned back in his seat. “Okay. This makes things easier and riskier. We’ll take the least-time course; these guys will kill everyone if they are just left to themselves. Follow drop schedule nine.” That meant wave after wave of unmanned devices. The first would be fine-targeted pulse bombs, trying to blind and numb Tarelsk’s eyes and automation. Closer in, the drops would be diggers, flooding the moon’s urban areas with Qeng Ho automation. If Pham’s plans worked, Terelsk’s automation would be confronted with another system, quite alien to, and uncontrollable by, the rulers’ ubiquitous law enforcement.

Pham’s fleet made a low-altitude pass by Namqem world. The maneuver kept them out of Tarelsk’s direct fire for a few thousand seconds. In itself, it was a kind of first. Civilized systems didn’t like large fusion rockets—much less starship drives—operating in the middle of urban areas. Heavy fines, even ostracism or confiscation were the price of such violations. For once, it was nice to give the finger to all of that. Pham’s thirty were decelerating at torch max, more than one gee, and had been for Ksecs. They swept over Namqem’s middle north latitudes at less than two hundred kilometers—and moving at almost two hundred kilometers per second. There was a glimpse of forests, of manicured deserts, of the temporary cities that housed the refugees from Alqin. And then they were heading out, their trajectory scarcely bent by the planetary mass. It was like something out of a children’s graphic, a planet literally whipping past their viewpoint.

Just kilometers ahead of them, space was alive with hellish light, and only some it was defensive fire. This was the real reason why high-speed flight in an urban area was insane. The space near Namqem world had once been an orderly scene of optimized usage. There had even been talk of setting up orbital towers.That optimization had been successfully resisted by the governance, but even so, low space was saturated with thousands of vehicles and satellites. In the best of times, microcollisions had created so much junk that garbage collection was the largest industry in near-Namqem space.

That orderly commerce had ended many Msecs earlier. The Qeng Ho armada had not precipitated this chaos, but they were rushing through it with bomb flares and ramfields that stretched out and sideways for hundreds of kilometers. Pham’s ramfields swept across millions of tonnes of junk and freighters and governance military vehicles…. Their coming had been announced; perhaps there were no innocent casualties. What was left behind was as tumbled and charred as any battlefield.

Tarelsk lay directly ahead. The million lights of its great days had been put out, either by governance fiat or by Pham’s pulse bombs. But the satellite was not dead. Casualties were as light as humanly possible. And in less than fifty seconds Pham’s ships would cut their torches. What followed would be the riskiest time of the adventure for them personally. Without the torches, they could not run their ramfields… and without the ramfields even accidental pieces of high-speed junk could cause damage.

“Forty seconds to flameout.” Their torches were already tuning down, so as not to destroy Tarelsk’s surface.

Pham scanned the reports from the other fleets: the landers down on Namqem world, the two thousand starships moving to save the starving at Maresk. Maresk floated like a deep-sea leviathan in the middle of a feeding frenzy. Many of the two thousand had been able to dock. The rest hung off-surface. The last of the freighters from the outer system was visible beyond Maresk’s limb. That huge, slow blimp had been launched Msecs earlier, when the outermost farms were still under effective automation. The freighter was as big as a starship, but with none of a ramscoop’s structural overhead. There were ten million tonnes of grain aboard it, enough to sustain Maresk a little while longer.

“Twenty seconds to flameout.”

Pham watched the view of Maresk for a couple of seconds more. Clouds of lesser craft swarmed around the Qeng Ho visitors there, but they were not fighting. The people there had not lost out to crazies as at Tarelsk.

Silver glyphs tripped across the top of Pham’s view, chilling fragments of ice. The message was from Sura’s agents on Maresk:Sabotage detected in harbored vehicles. Flee! Flee! Flee! And the view of Maresk vanished from Pham’s huds. For a moment he was looking out across the Far Regard’s bridge at an unembellished view back toward Namqem world. Daylight spread serenely across two-thirds of its face. In this true view, Maresk was hidden behind the planet.

And then the fringe of Namqem’s atmosphere flared with the light of a sun, a new sun that had been born somewhere beyond it. Two seconds later, there was another flash, and then another.

A moment before, theFar Regard ’s bridge crew had been totally intent on the flameout countdown and preparing for the dangers that would follow the loss of their ramfield protection. Now there was a surge of activity as they turned startled attention upon the lights that flashed across the limb of Namqem world. “Multigigatonne detonations around Maresk.” The analyst was trying to keep his voice level. “Our fleets near the surface—Lord—they’re gone!” Gone along with the billion-plus population of the megalopolis.

Sammy Park sat frozen, staring. Pham realized he might have to take over the bridge. But then Sammy leaned forward against his harness, and his voice was loud and sharp. “Tran, Lang, back to your stations. Look to our fleet!”

Another voice: “Flameout… now.”

Pham felt the familiar, falling lightness asFar Regard ’s main torch quenched to zero. His huds showed that all thirty of his fleet had flamed out within a hundred milliseconds of the planned instant. Less then four kilometers ahead floated Tarelsk, so near that it did not seem a moon or a planet so much as a landscape that stretched out and out around them. Before the coming of Humankind, Tarelsk had been just another dead and cratered moon, scarcely larger than the original Luna. But like Luna, the economics of transport had brought it greatness. By the light of Namqem world, Tarelsk was a landscape of pastels and soaring artificial mountains. And unlike old Luna, this world had never known human-made catastrophe… until now.

“Closing velocity fifty-five meters per second. Range thirty-five hundred meters.” By intent, they had finished their decel so close that the other side could not attack them without wounding themselves.But this madgovernance just killed a billion people. “Sammy! Get usdown ! Land anywhere, hard.”

“Uh—” Sammy’s gaze caught his, and now he understood, too. But it was too late.

All systems died, a vanishing that left his huds clear and silent. For the first time in his life, Pham Nuwen felt a physical jolt on a starship. A million tonnes of hull and shielding absorbed and smoothed out the event, butsomething had smashed against them. Pham looked around the bridge. A crowd of voices came through the air, reports from all over but without filtering or analysis.

“Contact nuke, by God!”

One by one, a scattering of displays came online, the backup wallpaper. The view slid smoothly across the Tarelsk landscape and into the sky. TheFar Regard was turning at several degrees per second. Some of the junior analysts were climbing out of their restraints.

Sammy shouted across the bridge. “Pick up drill! Contact secondaries!”

On the single functioning window-wall, the Tarelsk landscape came back into view, ramps and towers and clear domes over farmland. Tarelsk was so large that it could almost survive without the outer-system agriculture. And they were headed down into that at—fifteen meters per second? Without functioning huds he couldn’t see a closing velocity.

“How fast, Sammy?”

His Flag Captain shook his head. “Don’t know. That nuke hit us from the Tarelsk side, and almost on center. We can’t be going more than twenty meters per second now.” But in the spinning wreck that theFar Regard had become, there was no way they could slow down any more.

Sammy’s crew were busy to distraction, trying to contact the rest of the ship, resuming contact with the other ships of the thirty. Pham sat listening, watching. All the thirty had been nuked. TheFar Regard was not the most or the least damaged. As the reports trickled in, their view turned and turned… and the landscape grew. Pham could see blast damage. The crazies had trashed some of their own farms in this attack. Almost dead ahead… Lord… it was the old office towers that he and Sura had bought in the first century.

Ship collisions came in enormous variety, from millimeter-per-second bruisings, chiefly of interest to harbor police… to vast, bright flashes that wreck planetoids and vaporize spacecraft. TheFar Regard ’s encounter with Tarelsk was something in between the extremes. A million tonnes of starship drove downward through pressure domes and multilevel residences, but not much faster than a human might run in a one-gee field.

A million tonnes does not stop easily. The collision went on and on and on, a screaming, twisting fury. The city levels crushed more easily than hull metal and drive core, but the ship and the city around it mingled into a single ruin.

It couldn’t have lasted more than twenty seconds, but when it was over, Pham and the others hung on their harnesses in the two-tenths gravity of Tarelsk’s surface. Light flickered from the buckled walls, and the displays were mostly nonsense. Pham unlatched from his harness and slid down to walk on the ceiling. Dust swirled near the ventilator grids, but his full-press coveralls were tightening. The bridge itself was sucking vacuum. On the command channel, he could hear Sammy working down through damage assessment. There had been five hundred living people aboard the Far Regard… until just moments before.

“We lost all forward stowage, Fleet Captain. It’ll take Ksecs to get the bodies out. We—”

Pham climbed a wall to the hatch, and slid it open just a crack. There was a brief gale of equalizing wind. “Our landing crews, Sammy. Are they okay?”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“Get ’em together. You can leave the others as a rescue party, but we’re going out.” And kick some ass.

The next few Ksecs were confused. There was so much happening, and happening all at once. For all the years of planning, no one had really believed that the operation might end up as ground combat. And even the Qeng Ho armsmen were not real fighters. Pham Nuwen had seen more blood and death in medieval Canberra than most of them had seen in their whole lives.

But what they were fighting was not a real military either. The mad governance of Tarelsk had not even warned the surface boroughs of the impending collisions. Acting on their own, most people had pulled back from the highest levels, but still, millions had died in the long, slow crushing. Pham’s teams worked their way downward, to the second-level supertrams. He had comm with the other landings now. The people of Tarelsk were only a few years removed from the highest technology and best education in all Human Space.They understood the disaster; for the most part,they understood what their mad governance did not. But they were helpless before the systems that this last set of rulers used against them.

In his headset, Pham could hear another ship’s landing party, thirty kilometers away. They had run into ubiquitous law enforcement. “Everything is working here, sir—against us. I lost fifteen of my people at the tram station.”

“No help for it, Dav. You have pulse bombs. Use ’em, and then flood the utility cores with our automation.”

Sammy’s party was slipping farther and farther away from Pham’s. They had climbed through the same rents in hull metal, but at every turning, Sammy was going the other way. At first it didn’t matter. Comm through the walls was still easy, and the separation made them a more dispersed target… but hell, Sammy was already two klicks down-east from him. Pham’s party was surrounded by locals now, and some claimed to be utility system managers, people who could show them where to try for overrides. “Wait up, Sammy!”

The field link could support only low-rate video, so Pham couldn’t see what Sammy’s team was up to. But they were moving still farther away. After a moment: “Pham! We’ve broken through the rubble into… a university campus. There’s a blowout, and—” A still-pic from Sammy’s group popped up in Pham’s huds. There was a parklike lawn, at least several dozen locals running toward the camera—none of them wearing pressure suits. But up near the ceiling, dust and loose papers swirled. The audio feed was full of the high-pitched whistle of a substantial leak.

A second still-pic was mostly formed, this showing Sammy’s men at work with industrial patching equipment. The large crowd was coming out of nowhere, some of them children—the place must be one of those inverse towers. Sammy’s voice was back on the comm. “These are my people, Pham!”

Pham remembered that the Tarelsk side of Sammy Park’s family had been academics.Damn. “Don’t get sidetracked, Sammy. This place has more floorspace than all the cities on an average planet. The chances are zero we came down next to—”

“Not zero…” His voice broke in and out of audibility. “…didn’t tell you, seemed like a small thing. I made sureFar Regard would end up near the Polytech.”

Double damn.

“Look, we can save them, Pham! But more—they’ve been waiting for us…. Some of Sura’s people are here. Between them, they’ve got the core utility plans… and some of the new regime’s software changes. Pham, they think they know where the screwballs are holed up!”

Maybe it was a good thing that Sammy had had his own agenda; as ground combateers, the Qeng Ho pretty much stank. But with the core utility plans, they had a good fix on the governance and its control net.

Ten Ksec later, Pham had a comm link with the madmen who called themselves governance: a half-dozen red-eyed, panicky people. Their leader wore a uniform that might once have been from park maintenance. They were an endpoint of civilization.

“There’s nothing you can do but make things worse,” Pham told them.

“Nonsense. We have Tarelsk. We’ve wiped you and the gluttons at Maresk. We have more than enough resources to make Tarelsk self-sufficient. With you gone, we will bring a new order.” And then the video wavered and faded; Pham never knew if the break was deliberate or just the fractured comm system.

It didn’t matter. The conversation had lasted long enough to identify the intermediate nodes. And Pham Nuwen’s forces had hardware and software that was outside the heredity of Namqem. With their equipment and the help of the local population, the mad governance couldn’t survive more than a few more Ksecs.

When it was gone, the hardest work of the Rescue began.

THIRTY-NINE

The Qeng Ho Grand Meeting was held 20Msec later. Namqem solar system was still a disaster area. Alqin was mostly empty, its people camped on Namqem world, but not starving. Maresk, the smallest moon, was a radioactive wreck; rebuilding it would be the work of centuries. Almost a billion people had died there. But the last food shipment had been saved, the outer system agri automation restarted, and there was enough food for the two billion survivors on Tarelsk. The automation of Namqem had been trashed, and was operating at perhaps ten percent of its pre-debacle efficiency. The people of Namqem system who had survived till now would live to rebuild. There would be no extinction, no dark age. The survivors’ grandchildren would wonder at the terror of this time.

But there still was no civilized venue for the Grand Meeting. Pham and Sura stuck by the original decision. The Meeting would be out in Brisgo Gap, the most deserted place in the middle system. At least there was no destruction to look upon there, no local problems to solve. From Brisgo Gap, Namqem world and its three moons were just a blue-green disk and three spots of light.

Sura Vinh used the last of her asteroid resources to build the Grand Meeting temp. Pham had hoped that she would be impressed by the success that the Qeng Ho Plan had had. “We saved the civilization, Sura. Surely you believe me now. We can be more than furtive traders.”

But Sura Vinh was so old now. At the dawn of civilization, medical science had promised immortality. In the early millennia, progress had been rapid. Two hundred years of life, even three hundred, were achieved. After that, each advance was less impressive and more costly. And so Humankind had gradually lost another of its naive dreams. Coldsleep might postpone death for thousands of years, but even with the best medical support, you couldn’t expect much more than five hundred years of real lifetime. It was the ultimate limit on one man’s reach. And getting near that limit took an awful toll.

Sura’s powered chair was more like a mobile hospital ward than a piece of furniture. Her arms twitched up, weak even in zero gee. “No, Pham,” she said. Her eyes were clear and green as ever, surely transplants or artificial. Her voice was more obviously synthetic, but Pham could hear the familiar smile in it. “The Grand Meeting must decide, remember? We’ve never agreed on your plans. The point of coming together was to put the issue to a vote.”

That was what Sura had said ever since the earliest centuries, when she’d realized that Pham would never give up his dream. Oh, Sura, I don’t want to hurt you, but if my view must explicitly win over yours, so be it.

The temp that Sura towed into the middle of Brisgo Gap was enormous, even by the standards of her pre-debacle holdings. The starships of all the surviving fleets could moor at it, and Sura provided security extending out more than two million kilometers beyond the Gap.

The temp’s central volume was a zero-gee meeting hall. It was probably the grandest in history, large beyond all practical use. For Msecs before the Meeting itself, there was socializing, the largest single meeting of Traders there had ever been, probably the largest that would ever be. Pham took every Ksec he could from the rescue schedules to participate. Every day, he was making more contacts, interacting more than he could in a century of his life until now. Somehow he had to convert the doubters. And there were so many of them. They were basically decent, but so cautious and clever. Many of them were his own descendants. Their admiration—even their affection—seemed sincere, but he was never sure how many he had really convinced. Pham realized that he was edgier than he had ever been in combat, or even in hard trading.Never mind, he told himself. He had waited all his life for this. Small wonder that he should be nervous when the final test was just Msecs away.

The last Msecs before the Meeting were a frantic rearrangement of schedules. Namqem solar system still lacked decent automation. There would probably be a decade more during which outside help would be necessary to keep things from backsliding, to make sure that no more opportunists surfaced. But Pham wanted his own people at the Meeting. And Sura didn’t play games with his wish. Together, they set up a scheme that would bring all Pham’s people to the temp, and still not put the new governance of Namqem at risk.

And finally, Pham’s time came. His one, greatest opportunity to make things work. He looked out past the veil of the entrance curtains, at the sweep of the hall. Sura had just finished her introduction of Pham and was departing the speaker’s platform. Applause swept up from every direction. “Lord—” Pham muttered.

Behind him, Sammy Park said, “Nervous, sir?”

“Damn straight.” In fact, only once had he ever been frightened just this way… when as a little boy he had stepped onto a starship’s bridge and confronted the Traders of the Qeng Ho for the first time. He turned to look at his Flag Captain. Sammy was smiling. Since the rescues of Tarelsk, he had seemed happier than ever before. Too bad. He might not be starfaring again, not with Pham’s fleet, anyway. The people his crew had rescued, they really were his own family. And that cute little great-great-grandniece of his: Jun was a good person, but she had her own ideas about what Sammy should do with his life. Sammy stuck out his hand. “G-good luck, sir.”

And then Pham was through the curtains. He passed Sura on his way up. There was no time to speak, no way to hear. Her frail hand brushed his cheek. He rose to the central platform through wave upon wave of applause.Be calm. There were still at least twenty seconds before he had to say anything.Nineteen, eighteen… The Great Hall was nearly seven hundred meters across, and built in the most ancient tradition of an auditorium. His audience was an almost complete sphere of humanity, stationed at their ease along the inner surface of the hall, and facing on the tiny speaker’s platform. Pham looked this way and that, and up and down, and wherever he looked faces looked back. Correction: There was a swath of empty seats, nearly a hundred thousand, for the Qeng Ho who died in the destruction of Maresk. Sura had insisted on that layout—to honor the dead. Pham had agreed, but he knew that it was also Sura’s way of reminding everyone that what Pham proposed could have a terrible price.

Pham raised his arms as he reached the platform. All across his field of view, he saw the Qeng Ho responding. After a second, their applause came even louder to his ears. Through clear huds, he could not make out faces. From this distance, he could only guess at them according to the seating pattern. There were women all across the crowd. In a few places, they were rare. In most places, they were as common as the men. In some places—the Strentmannian Qeng Ho—women were the overwhelming majority. Maybe he should have appealed more to them; since Strentmann, he had come to realize that women can have the longest view. But the prejudices of medieval Canberra still had some subtle hold on him, and Pham had never really figured out how to lead women.

He turned his palms outward, and waited as the shouting gradually faded. The words of his speech floated in silver before his eyes. He had spent years thinking on this speech, and Msecs since the Rescue, polishing every nuance, every word.

But suddenly he didn’t need the little silver glyphs. Pham’s eyes saw past them to the humanity all around, and his words came effortlessly forth.

“My people!”

The crowd noise died to near silence. A million faces looked up at him, across at him, down at him.

“You hear my voice now with barely a second’s time lag. Here in Meeting, we hear our fellow Qeng Ho, even those from far Earth, in less than a second. For this first and maybe only time, we can see what we all are. And we can decide what we will be.

“My people, congratulations. We have come across light-centuries and rescued a great civilization from extinction. We did this despite the most terrible treachery.” He paused, gestured solemnly at the sweep of empty seats.

“Here at Namqem, we have broken the wheel of history. On a thousand worlds, Humankind has fought and fought, and even made itself extinct. The only thing that saves the race is time and distance—and until now that has also condemned humanity to repeat its failures.

“The old truths still hold: Without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology. But at the same time: Without help from outside, no sessile civilization can persist.”

Pham paused. He felt a wan smile steal across his face. “And so there is hope. Together, the two halves of what Humankind has become can make the whole live forever.” He looked all around, and let his huds magnify individual faces. They were listening. Would they finally agree? “The whole can live forever… if we can make the Qeng Ho more than mere sellers to customers.”

Pham didn’t remember much of the actual speaking of his speech; the ideas and the entreaties were such deep habits in his mind. His recollection was of the faces, the hope he saw in so many, the guarded caution he saw in so many more. In the end, he reminded them that a vote would be coming up, a final call on everything he had ever asked for. “So. Without your help we will surely fail, destroyed by the same wheel that crushes our Customer civilizations. But if you look just a little beyond the trade of the moment, if you make this extra investment in the future, then no dream will be beyond our ultimate reach.”

If the hall had been under acceleration, or on a planetary surface, Pham would have stumbled coming down from the platform. As it was, Sammy Park had to snag him as he passed the entrance curtains.

Above their heads, past the curtains, the sound of applause seemed to be getting louder.

Sura had remained in the anteroom, but there were other new faces—Ratko, Butra, and Qo. His first children, now older than he was.

“Sura!”

Her chair gave a littlechuff, and she floated across the space between them.

“Will you congratulate me on my speech?” Pham grinned, still feeling giddy. He extended his hands, gently took Sura’s. She was so frail, so old.Oh Sura! This should be our triumph. Sura was going to lose this one. And now she was so old, she would never see it as anything but defeat. She would never see what they both had wrought.

The applause above them grew still louder. Sura glanced up. “Yes. In every way, you have done better than I had thought. But then, you have always done better than anyone could imagine.” Her synthetic voice managed to sound sad and proud at the same time. She gestured away from the anteroom and the noise. Pham followed her out, and the sounds faded behind him. “But you know how much of this is luck, don’t you?” she continued. “You wouldn’t have had a chance if Namqem hadn’t come apart just as the fleet of fleets arrived.”

Pham shrugged. “It was good luck indeed. But it proved my point, Sura! We both know that a collapse like this can be the deadliest—and we saved them.”

What he could see of Sura’s body was clothed in a quilted business suit that could not disguise the gauntness of her limbs. But her mind and will remained, sustained by the medical unit in her chair. Sura’s shake of the head was as forceful and almost as natural as when she’d been a young woman. “Saved them? You made a difference certainly, but billions still died. Be honest, Pham. It took a thousand years for us to set up this meeting. It’s not the sort of thing that can be done every time some civilization goes down the toilet. And without the Maresk die-off, even your five thousand ships would not have been enough. The whole system would be at the edge of its carrying capacity, with still greater disasters in the near future.”

All that had occurred to Pham; he had argued against variants of the point for Msecs before the Meeting. “But Namqem is the hardest rescue we could possibly face, Sura. An old civilization, entrenched, a civilization exploiting every solar-system resource. We would have had a much easier time with a world threatened with bio-plague or even a totalitarian religion.”

Sura was shaking her head. Even now she ignored what Pham set before her. “No. In most cases, you can make a difference, but more often than not it will be like Canberra—a small difference for the better, and written in Trader blood. You’re right: Without the fleet of fleets, civilization would have died here in Namqem system. But some people would have survived on Namqem world; some of the asteroid-belt urbs might have survived. The old story would have been repeated, and someday there would be civilization here again, even if by external colonization. You have bridged that abyss, and billions are rightly grateful… but it will take years of careful management to bring this system back. Maybe we here”—her hand twitched in the direction of the Meeting Hall—“can do that, and maybe not. But I know that we can’t do it for the universe and for all time.” Sura did something, and her chairchuff ’d to a halt.

She turned, extended her arms to touch Pham’s shoulders. And suddenly Pham had the strangest feeling, almost a kinesthetic memory, of looking up into her face and feeling her hands on his shoulders. It was a memory from before they were partners, before they were lovers. A memory from their earliest time on theReprise: Sura Vinh, the young woman, serious. There were times when she’d gotten so angry with little Pham Nuwen. There were times when she’d reached out to grab his shoulders, tried to hold him still long enough to make him understand what his young barbarian mind chose to ignore. “Son, don’t you see? We span all Human Space, but we can’t manage whole civilizations. You’d need a race of loving slaves to do it. And we Qeng Ho will never be that.”

Pham forced himself to look back into Sura’s eyes. She had argued this since the beginning, and never wavered.I should have known it would cometo this someday. So now she would lose, and Pham could do nothing to help her. “I’m sorry Sura. When you give your speech, you can say this to a million people. Many of them will believe. And then we’ll allvote. And—” And from what he had seen in the Great Hall, and what he saw in Sura Vinh’s eyes… for the first time, Phamknew that he had won.

Sura turned away, and her artificial voice was soft. “No. I won’t be giving that speech. Elections? Funny that you should be depending on them now…. We’ve heard how you ended the Strentmannian Pogrom.”

The change in topic was absurd, but the comment touched a nerve. “I was down to one ship, Sura. What would you have done?” I saved theirdamn civilization, the part that wasn’t monstrous.

Sura raised her hand. “I’m sorry…. Pham, you are just too lucky, too good.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself now. “For almost a thousand years, you and I have worked to make this meeting. It was always a sham, but along the way, we created a trading culture that may last as long as your optimistic dreams. And I always knew that in the end, when we were all face-to-face in a Grand Meeting, common sense would prevail.” She shook her head, and a smile quavered. “But I never imagined that luck would give you the Namqem debacle so perfectly timed—or that you would master it like magic. Pham, if we follow your way, we’ll likely have disaster here in Namqem within a decade. In a few centuries, the Qeng Ho will fragment into a dozen dozen conflicting structures that all think themselves ‘interstellar governances.’ And the dream we shared will be destroyed.

“You’re right, Pham. You might win the election… and that’s why there won’t be one, at least not the kind you think.”

The words didn’t register for a moment. Pham Nuwen had been exposed to treachery a hundred times. The sense for it was burned into him before he’d ever seen a starship. But… Sura? Sura was the only one he could always trust, his savior, his lover, his best friend, the one he’d schemed with for a lifetime. And now—

Pham looked around the room, his mind undergoing a change-of-ground more profound than any in his life. Besides Sura, there were Sura’s aides, six of them. There were also Ratko and Butra and Qo. Of his own assistants—there was only Sammy Park. Sammy stood a little off to the side; he looked sick.

Finally, he looked back at Sura. “I don’t understand… but whatever the game, there’s no way you can change the election. A million people heard me.”

Sura sighed. “They heard you, and you might have a bare majority in a fair election. But many you think supported you… are really with me.”

She hesitated, and Pham looked again at his three children. Ratko avoided his gaze, but Butra and Qo looked back with grim steadiness. “We never wanted to hurt you, Papa,” Ratko said, finally looking at him. “We love you. This whole charade of a meeting was supposed to show you that the Qeng Ho could not be what you wished. But it didn’t go the way we expected—”

Ratko’s words didn’t matter. It was the look on his children’s faces. It was the same closed stoniness of Pham’s brothers and sisters, one Canberra morning. And all the love in between… a charade?

He looked back at Sura. “So how do you propose to win? With the sudden, accidental death of half a million people? Or just the selective assassination of thirty thousand hard-core Nuwenists? It won’t work, Sura. There are too many good people out there. Maybe you can win this day, but the word will remain, and sooner or later, you’ll have your civil war.”

Sura shook her head. “We’re not killing anyone, Pham. And the word won’t go out, at least not widely. Your speech will be remembered by those in the hall, but their recorders—most are using our information utilities. Our free hospitality, remember? Ultimately your speech will be polished into something… safer.”

Sura continued, “Over the next twenty Ksec, you will be in special meeting with your opposition. Coming out of that you will announce a compromise: The Qeng Ho will put a much greater effort into our network information services, the sort of thing that can help rebuild civilizations. But you will withdraw your notion of interstellar governance, convinced by the arguments of the rest of us.”

A charade. “You could fake that. But afterwards, you’ll still have to kill a lot of people.”

“No. You will announce your new goal, an expedition to the far side of Human Space. It will be clear that this is partly out of bitterness, but you will wish us well. Your far fleet is almost ready, Pham, about twenty degrees back along the Gap. We have equipped it honestly and well. Your fleet’s automation is unusually good, far more expensive than what would be profitable. You won’t need a continuous Watch, and the first wake-up will be centuries from now.”

Pham looked from face to face. Something like Sura’s treachery could work, but only if most of the Fleet Captains that he thought supported him were really like Ratko and Butra and Qo. And then only if they had set up proper lies with their own people. “How… long have you been planning this, Sura?”

“Ever since you were a young man, Pham. Most of the years of my life. But I prayed it would never come to this.”

Pham nodded, numb. If she had planned that long, there would be no obvious mistakes. It didn’t matter. “My fleet awaits, you say?” His lips twisted around the words. “And all the incorrigibles will surely be its crew. How many? Thirty thousand?”

“A good deal less, Pham. We’ve studied your hard-core supporters very carefully.”

Given the choice, who wanted to go on a one-way trip to forever? They had been very careful to keep those supporters out of this room. All but Sammy. “Sammy?”

His Flag Captain met his eyes, but his lips were trembling. “Sir. I’m s-sorry. Jun wants a different life for me. We—we’re still Qeng Ho, but we can’t ship with you.”

Pham inclined his head. “Ah.”

Sura floated closer, and Pham realized that if he pushed off, he could probably grab the handle on her chair and ram his fist right through her scrawny quilted chest.And break my hand for the effort. Sura’s heart had been a machine for centuries. “Son? Pham? It was a beautiful dream, and along the way it made us what we are. But in the end it was just a dream. A failed dream.”

Pham turned away without responding. Now there were guards by the doors, waiting to escort him. He didn’t look at his children. He brushed past Sammy Park without a word. From somewhere in the still, cold depths of his heart, something wished his Flag Captain well. Sammy had betrayed him, but not like the others. And no doubt Sammy believed the lies about a far fleet. He hoped that Sammy would never see through them. Who would ever pay for a fleet such as Sura described? Not crafty merchants like Sura Vinh and her stone-faced children and the others who had plotted this day. Far cheaper, far safer to build a fleet of real coffins.My father would haveunderstood. The best enemies are the ones who sleep without end.

Then Pham was in a long corridor, surrounded by guards who were also strangers. His last vision of Sura’s face still hung in Pham’s imagination. There had been tears in the old woman’s eyes. One last fakery.

A tiny cabin, mostly dark. The kind of room a junior officer might have in a small temp. Work jackets floated in a closet bag. A lapel tag whispered, and a name floated in his eyes:Pham Trinli.

As always, when Pham let the anger fill him, the memories were more vivid than any huds, and the return to the present was a kind of mocking. Sura’s “far fleet” had not been a fleet of coffins. Even now, two thousand years after Sura’s betrayal, Pham still could not explain that. Most likely, there had been other traitors, ones with some power and some conscience, who had insisted that Pham and those who wouldn’t betray him must not be killed. The “fleet” had been scarcely more than refitted ram barges, with space for nothing but the refugees and their coldsleep tanks. But there had been a separate trajectory for each ship of the “fleet.” A thousand years later, they were scattered across the width and height of Human Space.

They had not been killed, but Pham had learned his lesson. He had begun his slow, silent journey back. Sura was beyond mortal reach. But there was still the Qeng Ho that he and she had created, the Qeng Ho that had betrayed him. He still had his dream.

…And he would have died with it at Triland, if Sammy had not dug him up. Now fate and time had handed him a second chance: the promise of Focus.

Pham shook away the past, and readjusted the localizers at his temple and in his ear. There was more work than ever to be done. He should have risked more face-to-face meetings with Vinh before now. With good feedback drills, Vinh could learn to handle shocks like this crazy Nau interview, without giving everything away. Yeah, that was the easy part. The hard part would be to keep him distracted from where Pham was ultimately headed.

Pham turned in his sleeping bag, let his breathing shift to a light snore. Behind his eyes, the images shifted to the action traces he was running on Reynolt and the snoops. He had fooled them again. In the long run…? If there weren’t any more stupid surprises, in the long run, Anne Reynolt was still the greatest threat.

FORTY

Hrunkner Unnerby flew into Calorica Bay on the First Day of the Dark. Over the years, Unnerby had been at Calorica a number of times. Hell, he’d been here right after mid-Brightness, when the bottom of the pit was still a boiling cauldron. In the years after that, the edge of the mountains had harbored a small town of construction engineers. During the mid-Brightness, conditions were hellish even at high altitude, but the workers were very well paid; the launch facilities farther up in the altiplano were funded by a combination of royal and commercial monies, and after Hrunk installed good cooling machines, it wasn’t an uncomfortable place to live. The rich people hadn’t begun showing up until the Waning Years, settling as they had for each of the last five generations, in the caldera wall.

But of all Hrunk’s visits, this had the strangest feel. The First Day of the Dark. It was a boundary in the mind more than anywhere else—and perhaps that made it even more important.

Unnerby had taken a commercial flight out of High Equatoria, but it was no tourister. High Equatoria might be only five hundred miles away, but it was as far as you could get from the wealth of Calorica Bay on the First Day of the Dark. Unnerby and his two assistants—bodyguards actually—waited until the other passengers had clambered forward along the aisle webway. Then they pulled down their parkas and heated leggings and the two panniers that were the whole reason for the flight. Just short of the exit hatch, Hrunkner lost his grip on the webbing and one of the panniers fell by the feet of the aircraft’s steward. The all-weather covering split partway open, revealing the contents to be shale-colored powder, carefully wrapped in plastic sacks.

Hrunkner dropped from the aisle webbing and refastened the pannier. The steward laughed, bemused. “I’ve heard it said High Equatoria’s best export was plain mountain dirt—never expected to see anyone take it seriously.”

Unnerby shrugged his embarrassment. Sometimes that was the best cover. He reshouldered the pannier and made to button his parka.

“Ah, um.” The steward seemed about to say something more, but then stepped back and bowed them off the aircraft. The three of them rattled down the ladders to the tarmac, and suddenly it was obvious what else the fellow had been about to say. Just an hour ago, as they were leaving High Equatoria, the air had been eighty below freezing and the wind over twenty miles per hour. They had needed heated breathers just to walk from the High Eq terminal to the aircraft.

Here… “By damn, this place is a furnace!” Brun Soulac, his junior security agent, set down her pannier and shrugged out of her parka.

The senior agent laughed, though she was guilty of the same foolishness. “What do you expect, Brun! It’s Calorica Bay.”

“Yeah, but this is the First Day of the Dark!”

Some of the other passengers had been similarly shortsighted. They made a grotesque parade, hopping about as they shed parkas and breathers and leggings. Even so, Unnerby noticed that whenever Brun’s hands and feet were totally occupied with shedding cold-weather gear, Arla Undergate had free hands and a clear view around them. Brun was similarly alert when Arla was shucking her overclothes. By some magic, their service pistols were never visible during the exercise. They could act like idiots, but underneath the act, Arla and Brun were as good as any soldiers Unnerby had known in the Great War.

The mission to High Equatoria might have been low-tech and low-key, but the Intelligence team in the airport was efficient enough. The bags of rock flour were carted off in armored cars; even more impressive, the major in charge had not even wisecracked about the absurdity of the operation.

Inside of thirty minutes, Hrunk and his now not-so-relevant bodyguards were out on the street.

“What d’ya mean, ‘not relevant’?” Arla waved her arms in exaggerated wonder. “Not relevant was shepherding that… stuff across the continent.” Neither of the two knew the importance of the rock flour, and they had not been shy in showing their contempt for it. They were good agents, but they didn’t have the attitude Hrunk was used to. “Now we have something important to guard.” She jerked a hand in Unnerby’s direction, and there was something serious behind the good humor. “Why didn’t you make our life easy, and go with the major’s people?”

Hrunkner smiled back. “It’s more than an hour before I meet the chief. Plenty of time to walk the distance. Aren’t you curious, Arla? How many ordinary folks get to see Calorica on the First Day of the Dark?”

Arla and Brun glowered at that, the look of noncoms confronted by stupid behavior that they could not correct. Unnerby had felt that way often enough in his life, though normally he hadn’t shown his disapproval so obviously. The Kindred had demonstrated more than once their willingness to be violent on other peoples’ lands.But I’ve lived seventy-five years, andthere are so many things to be afraid of. He was already moving away, toward the lights at the water’s edge. Unnerby’s usual bodyguards, the ones who accompanied him on his foreign site visits, would have bodily restrained him. Arla and Brun were loaners, not so well briefed. After a moment, they scurried forward to pace him. But Arla was talking into her little telephone. Unnerby grinned to himself. No, these two weren’t stupid.I wonder if I’ll notice the agents she’s calling.

Calorica Bay had been a wonder of the world since the earliest times. It was one of only three volcanic sites known—and the other two were under ice and ocean. The bay itself was actually the broken-down bowl of the volcano, and ocean waters drowned most of its central pit.

In the early years of a New Sun, it was a hell of hells, though no one had directly observed the place then. The steeply curving walls of the bowl concentrated the sun’s light and the temperatures climbed above the melting point of lead. Apparently this provoked—or allowed—fast lava seepage, and a continuous series of explosions, leaving new crater walls by the time the sun had dimmed to mid-Brightness. Even in those years, only the most foolhardy explorers poked themselves over the altiplano rim of the bowl.

But as the sun dimmed into the Waning Years of its cycle, a different visitor appeared. As northern and southern lands found winters that were steadily harsher, now the highest reaches of the bowl were pleasant and warm. And as the world cooled, lower and lower parts of the bowl became first accessible, and then a paradise. Over the last five generations, Calorica Bay had become the most exclusive resort of the Waning Years, the place where people so rich that they didn’t have to save and work to prepare for the Dark could come and enjoy themselves. At the height of the Great War, when Unnerby was pounding snow on the Eastern Front, and even later, when most of the war was tunnel fighting—even then, he remembered seeing tinted engravings showing the life of mid-Brightness leisure that the idle rich led at the bottom of Calorica’s bowl.

In a way, Calorica at the beginning of the Dark was like the world that modern engineering and atomic energy were bringing to the entire race of Spiders, for all the years of the Dark. Unnerby walked toward the music and lights ahead, wondering what he would see.

The crowds swirled everywhere. There was laughter and pipe music and occasional argument. And the people were strange in so many ways that for a while Unnerby did not notice the most important things.

He let the crowd motion jostle them this way and that like particles in a suspension. He could imagine how nervous Arla and Brun felt about this mob of uncleared strangers. But they made the most of it, blending into the rowdy noise, just accidentally staying within arm’s reach of Unnerby. In a matter of minutes, the three had been swept down to the water’s edge. Some in the crowd waved burning sticks of incense, but there was a stronger perfume here at the bottom of the crater, a sulfurous odor that drifted on the warm breeze. Across the water, at the middle of the bay, molten rock glowed in red and near-red and yellow. Steam floated up, wraithlike, all round the center pile. This was one body of water where no one need worry about bottom ice and leviathans—though a volcanic blast would kill them all just as dead.

“Damn!” Brun slipped out of character, jostled Unnerby back from the edge of the plaza. “Look out there in the water. There are people drowning!”

Unnerby stared a second at where she was pointing. “Not drowning. They’re… by the Dark, they’re playing in the water!” The half-submerged figures were wearing some sort of pontoons to keep from sinking. The three of them just stared, and he noticed they were not alone in their surprise, though most of the onlookers tried to cover their shock. Why would anyoneplay at drowning? For a military goal perhaps; in warmer times, both Kindred and Accord had warships.

Thirty feet down the stone palisade, another reveler splashed into the water. Suddenly, the water’s edge seemed like the edge of a deadly cliff. Unnerby backed off, away from the screams of delight or horror that came from the water. The three of them drifted across the bottom plaza toward light-bedecked trees. Here, in the open, they had a clear view of the sky and the caldera walls.

It was midafternoon, yet except for the cool-colored lights in the trees, and the heat colors from crater-center, it was as dark as any night. The sun looked down on them, a faint blotch in the sky, a reddish disk pocked with small dark marks.

The First Day of the Dark. Religions and nations set minor variations in the date. The New Sun began with an explosive blaze of light, though no one was alive to see it. But the end of the light—that was a slow waning that extended across almost the whole of the Brightness. For the last three years, the sun had been a pale thing, scarcely warming your back at high noon, dim enough to stare at with a fully open gaze. For the last year, the brighter stars had been visible all through the day. But even that was not officially the beginning of the Dark, though it was a sign that green plants couldn’t grow anymore, that you’d better have your main food supplies in your deepness, and that tuber and grub farms would be all that could sustain you until it came time to retreat beneath the earth.

So in that gradual slide toward oblivion, what was it that marked the instant—the day at least—that was the first of the Dark? Unnerby stared straight at the sun. It was the color of a warm stovetop, but so dim he felt no warmth. It would get no dimmer. Now the world would simply grow colder and colder and colder with nothing more than starlight and that reddish disk to light it. From now on, the air would always be too cold to be easily breathed. In past generations, this marked the beginning of the final rush to store the necessities in one’s deepness. In past generations, it marked the last chance for a father to provide for his cobblies’ future. In past generations, it marked a time of high nobility and great treason and cowardice, when all those who were not quite prepared were confronted by the fact of the Dark and the cold.

Here, today—Hrunk’s attention moved to those on the plaza between him and the trees. There were some—old cobbers and many from the proper current generation—who raised their arms to the sun and then lowered them to embrace the earth and the promise that the long sleep should represent.

But the air around them was mild as a summer evening in the Middle Years. And the ground was warm, as if the sun of the Middle Years had just set and left the afternoon heat to seep up at them. Most of the people around them were not acknowledging the departure of light. They were laughing, singing—and their clothes were as bright and expensive as if they’d never given any thought to the future. Maybe the rich had always been like that.

The cool-colored lights in the trees must be powered by the main fission plant that Unnerby’s companies had built in the highlands above the caldera, almost five years ago. They turned the bottomland forest all aglimmer. Someone had imported lazy woodsfairies, released them by the tens of thousands. Their wings glistened blue and green and far-blue in the light, as the creatures swirled in sympathy with the crowds under the trees.

In the forest, the people danced in piles, and some of the youngest ones ran up into the trees to play with the fairies. The music became frantic as they walked to the center of the grove and started up a gentle incline that would lead to the bottom estates. By now he was used to the sight of out-of-phase people. Even though his instincts still called them a perversion, they really were necessary. He liked and respected many of them. On either side of him, Arla and Brun were unobtrusively clearing the way for him. Both his guards were oophase, about twenty years old, just a little younger than Little Victory must be now. They were good cobbers, as good as any he had ever fought alongside of. Yes, case by case, Hrunkner Unnerby had come to terms with his revulsion. But… I’ve never seen so manyoophases, all together.

“Hey, old fellow, come dance with us!” Two young ladies and a male pounced on him. Somehow Arla and Brun got him free, all the time pretending to be jolly dancers themselves. In the darkened space beneath one tree, Unnerby got a glimpse of what looked like a fifteen-year-old’s molt. It was as if all the carven images of sin and laziness had suddenly become real. Sure, the air was pleasantly warm, but it carried the stench of sulfur. Sure, the ground was pleasantly warm, but he knew that it was not sun’s warmth. Instead, it was a heat in the earth itself that extended down and down, like heat from a rotting body. Any deepness dug here would be a death trap, so warm that the sleepers’ flesh would rot in their shells.

Unnerby didn’t know how Arla and Brun managed it, but eventually they were on the far side of the forest. Here there were still the crowds and the trees—but the mania of the bottom was muted. The dancing was sedate enough that clothes were not torn. Here, the woodsfairies felt safe enough to land on their jackets, to sit and swing the colored lace of their wings with lazy impudence. Everywhere else in the world, these creatures had lost their wings years ago. Five years ago, Unnerby had walked through Princeton streets after a heavy frost, his boot tips crunching through thousands of colored petals, the wings of sensible woodsfairies, now burrowing deep to lay their tiny eggs. The lazy variant might have a few more summer seasons of life, but they were doomed… or should have been.

The three walked higher and higher, up the first slopes of the crater wall. Ahead, the mansions of the Late Waning stretched in a ring of light all the way around the wall. Of course, none of these was more than ten years old, but most were built in the parasol-and-bauble style of the last generation. The buildings were new, but the money and the families were old. Almost every estate was a radial property, extending up the crater wall. The mansions of the early waning, halfway up the wall, were often dark, their open architecture unusable. Unnerby could see the glisten of snow on those higher mansions. Sherkaner’s place was up there somewhere, among those rich enough to weatherize the high ground of an estate, but too cheap to rebuild down at the bottom. Sherkaner knew that even Calorica Bay could not escape the Dark of the Sun… it took nuclear power to do that.

Between the lights of the bottom forest and the ring of estates, there was shadow. The woodsfairies took off, their wings faintly glistening, to fly back to the bottom. The sulfur smell was faint, not as sharp as the clean chill of the air. Above them, the sky was dark but for the stars and the pale disk of the sun. That was real, the Dark. Unnerby just stared for a moment, trying to ignore the lights of the bottom. He tried to laugh. “So which would you rather have, cobbers, some honest enemy action or another run through that mob?”

Arla Undergate’s answer was serious. “I’d opt for the mob, of course. But… that was very strange.”

“Scary, you mean.” Brun sounded downright uneasy.

“Yeah,” said Arla. “But did you notice? A lot of those cobbers were scared, too. I don’t know, it’s like they’re all—we’re all—lazy woodsfairies. When you look up andsee the Dark, when you see that the sun has died… you feel awfully small.”

“Yeah.” Unnerby didn’t know what more to say. These two youngsters were oophase. Surely, they hadn’t been submerged in trad notions all their lives. And yet they had some of the same gut misgivings as Hrunkner Unnerby. Interesting.

“C’mon. The funicular station is around here someplace.”

FORTY-ONE

Most of the midlevel mansions were huge things, stone and heavy timber frontis-halls, extending back to natural caves in the crater wall. Hrunkner had been expecting some kind of “Hill House South,” but in fact Underhill’s place was a disappointment. It looked like a guest house for one of the real mansions, and much of the space inside was shared with security staff, doubled now that the chief was in residence. Unnerby was informed that his precious cargo had already been delivered, and that he would be called for soon. Arla and Brun collected their receipt for delivering him, and Hrunk was shown into a not-so-spacious staff lounge. He passed the afternoon reading some very old news magazines.

“Sergeant?” It was General Smith, standing in the doorway. “Sorry for the delay.” She wore an unmarked quartermaster uniform, very much like Strut Greenval used to wear. Her figure was almost as lean and delicate as ever, though her gestures seemed a little inflexible. Hrunkner followed her back through the security section, and then up winding wooden stairs. “We’ve had some good luck on this one, Sergeant, you catching Sherk and me so close to your discovery.”

“Yes, ma’am. Rachner Thract set up the itinerary.” The stairs circled round and round between jade walls. Closed doors and an occasional darkened room showed to the sides. “Where are the children?” The question slipped thoughtlessly out of him.

Smith hesitated, certainly looking for some complaint in his words. “…Junior enlisted a year ago.”

That he had heard. It had been so long since he had seen Little Victory. He wondered how she would like the military. She had always seemed a tough little cobblie, but with a piece of Sherkaner’s whimsy. He wondered if Rhapsa and Little Hrunk might still be around.

The stairs emerged from the crater wall. This part of the residence presumably had existed in the early part of the Waning Years. But where before there had been open courts and patios, now triple-paned quartz stood strong against the Dark. It dimmed all the far colors, but the view was naked and stark. The city lights glittered across the bottomland, circling the heat-red lake at the center. A cold fog hung in the air above the water. It glowed dimly with all the light from below. The General pulled the shades on the view as they ascended toward what must have been the original owner’s high perch.

She waved him into a large, brightly lit room.

“Hrunk!” Sherkaner Underhill emerged from the overstuffed pillows that were the room’s furniture. Surely these were furnishings of the original owner. Unnerby couldn’t imagine either the General or Underhill choosing such ornaments.

Underhill trotted awkwardly across the room, his enthusiasm overmatching his agility. He had a large guide-bug on a leash, and the creature corrected his course, patiently bringing him toward the entrance. “You’ve missed Rhapsa and Little Hrunk by a couple of days, I’m afraid. Those two aren’t the cobblies you remember; they’re seventeen years old now! But the General didn’t approve of the atmosphere around here, and she shipped them back to Princeton.”

Behind himself, Hrunkner saw the General glower at her husband, but she made no comment. Instead she walked slowly from window to window, pulling the blinds, shutting out the Dark. At one time, this room had been an open gazebo; now there were a lot of windows. They settled themselves. Sherkaner was full of news about the children. The General sat in silence. As Sherk launched into Jirlib and Brent’s latest adventures, she said, “I’m sure the Sergeant isn’t that interested in hearing about our children.”

“Oh, but I—” Unnerby began, then saw the tenseness in the General’s aspect. “But I guess we have much else to talk about, don’t we?”

Sherk hesitated, then leaned forward to stroke his guide-bug’s carapace fur. The creature was large, must have weighed seventy pounds, but it looked gentle and smart. After a moment, the bug began purring. “I wish the rest of you were as easy to please as Mobiy here. But yes, we do have a lot to talk about.” He reached under a filigreed table—the thing looked like a Treppen-dynasty original, something that had survived four passages through the deepnesses of some rich family—and pulled out one of the plastic bags that Hrunk had brought from High Equatoria. He set it on the table with a thump. Wisps of rock flour spread across the polished wood.

“I boggle, Hrunk! Your magic rock dust! What put you on to this? You make one little detour—and bag a secret that all our external intelligence had totally missed.”

“Wait, wait. You make it sound like somebody fell down on the job.” Some people might look very bad unless he set things straight. “This was outside channels, but Rachner Thract cooperated with me one hundred percent. He loaned me the two cobbers that I came in with. More important, it was his agents at High Equatoria—you know the story?” Four of Thract’s people had trekked across the altiplano, brought back that rock flour from the Kindred’s inner refinery.

Smith nodded. “Yes. Don’t worry, I blame myself for missing this. We’ve gotten too confident with all our technical superiority.”

Sherkaner was chuckling. “Quite so.” He poked around in the rock flour. The lights in here were bright and full-color, much better than down in airport customs. But even in good light, the powder looked like nothing more than shale-colored dust—upland equatorial shale, if one were well-trained in mineralogy. “But I still don’t see how you came upon this—even as a possibility.”

Unnerby leaned back. Actually, the pillows felt pretty good compared with third-class passenger webbing. “Well, you remember, about five years ago, that joint Kindred-Accord expedition to the center of the altiplano? They had a couple of physicists who claimed gravity was screwball there.”

“Yes. They thought the mine shafts there would be a good place to establish a new lower boundary for the equivalence principle; instead they found big differences, which depended on the time of day. As you say, they got screwball answers, but they retracted the whole thing after they recalibrated.”

“That’s the story—but when I was putting in the power plant for West Undergate, I ran into one of the Accord physicists from that expedition. Triga Deepdug is a solid engineer, even if she is a physicist; I got to know her pretty well. Anyway, she claimed that the experimental method on that first expedition was fine, and that she was squeezed out of later participation…. So I began to wonder about that huge open-pit mining operation the Kindred started on the altiplano just a year after the expedition. That’s almost centered on the physics site—and they had to build five hundred miles of rail to serve it.”

“They found copper,” said Smith. “A good strike, and that’s no lie.”

Unnerby smiled at her. “Of course. Anything less and you would have tumbled to it right away. But still… the copper mine is a marginal operation. And my physicist friend knows her business. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be nice to see what’s going on there.” He waved at the bag of rock powder. “What you see there is from their third-level refining. The Kindredian miners had to go through several hundred tons of Equatoria shale to filter out this little packet. My guess is they filter it another hundredfold before they get their final product.”

Smith nodded. “And I’ll wager that is kept in harder vaults than the Tiefer holy gemstones.”

“Sure. Thract’s team didn’t come close to the final product.” Hrunkner tapped at the rock powder with the tip of one hand. “I hope this is enough that you can prove we found something.”

“Oh, it is. It is!”

Unnerby stared at Sherk in surprise. “You’ve had it hardly four hours!”

“You know me, Hrunk. This may be a vacation resort, but I’ve got my hobbies.” And a laboratory to pursue them, no doubt. “Under proper lighting, your rock flour weighs almost half a percent less than otherwise…. Congratulations, Sergeant, you’ve discovered antigravity.”

“I—” Triga Deepdug had been so sure, but until now Unnerby hadn’t really believed. “Okay, Mister Instant Analysis, how does it work?”

“Beats me!” Sherk was practically vibrating with glee. “You’ve found something genuinely new. Why, not even the…” He seemed to be searching for words, then settled for: “But it’s a subtle thing. I ground a sample of the dust even finer—and you know, nothing floats off the top; you can’t distill the ‘antigravity fraction.’ I think we’re seeing some kind of group effect. My lab here isn’t up to doing more. I’m going to fly back to Princeton with this first thing tomorrow. Besides its magic weight, there’s only one strange thing I’ve found. These upland shales always have some diamond foram content, but in this stuff the smallest forams—the millionth-inch hexens—are enriched by a factor of a thousand. I want to look for evidence of classical fields in the dust. Maybe these foram particles mediate something. Maybe—” And Skerkaner Underhill was off into a dozen speculations, and plans for a dozen dozen tests to extract the truth from those speculations. As he talked, the years seemed to fall away from him. He still had the tremor, but all his hands had come away from his guide-bug’s leash, and his voice was full of joy. It was the enthusiasm that had pushed his students and Unnerby and Victory Smith to make a new world. As he spoke, Victory rose from her perch and came over to sit close beside him. She draped her right arms across his shoulders and gave him a sharp, rippling hug.

Unnerby felt himself grinning back at Sherkaner, captured by the other’s words. “Remember all the trouble you got into on the children’s radio hour? Saying ‘all the sky can be our deepness’? By God, Sherk, with this stuff, who needs rockets? We can hoist real ships into space. We can finally find out what caused those lights we saw in the Dark! Maybe we can even find other worlds out there.”

“Yes, but—” Sherkaner began, but suddenly weaker, almost as if getting manic enthusiasm reflected back on him made him realize all the problems that stood between dream and reality. “But, um, we still have Honored Pedure and the Kindred to contend with.”

Hrunkner remembered his walk through the bottom forest.And we stillhave to learn to live in the Dark.

The years seemed to come back down upon Sherkaner. He reached out to pet Mobiy, and set two other hands on the animal’s leash. “Yes, there are so many problems.” He shrugged, as if acknowledging his age and the distance to his dreams. “But I can’t do anything more to save the world till I get to Princeton. This evening is my best chance in a while to see how crowds react to the Dark. What did you think of our First Day of the Dark, Hrunk?”

Down from the heights of hope, head to head with the limitations of Spiderkind. “It was—scary, Sherk. We’ve given up all the rules one by one, and I saw what’s left down there this afternoon. Even—even if we win against Pedure, I’m not sure what we’ll be left with.”

The old grin wavered across Sherkaner’s aspect. “It’s not that bad, Hrunk.” He came slowly to his feet and Mobiy guided him toward the door. “Most folks left in Calorica are foolish old-money rich… you have to expect a little dissipation. But there’s still something to be learned by watching them.” He waved at the General. “I’m going to take a walk around the bottom of the ringwall, my dear. These young folks may have some interesting insights.”

Smith came off her pillows, walked around Mobiy to give her husband a little hug. “You’ll take the usual security team? No tricks?”

“Of course.” And Hrunkner had the feeling her request was deadly serious, that since twelve years ago Sherkaner and all the Underhill children were very good about accepting protection.

The jade doors closed softly behind Sherkaner, and Unnerby and the General were alone. Smith returned to her perch, and the silence stretched long. How many years had it been since he had talked to the General in person without a roomful of staff around? They exchanged electronic mail constantly. Unnerby wasn’t officially on Smith’s staff, but the fission-plant program was the single most important civilian part of her plan, and he took her advice as his command, moving from city to city according to her schedule, doing his best to build to her specs and her deadlines—and still keep the commercial contractors happy. Almost every day, Unnerby was on the phone to her staff. Several times a year they met at staff meetings.

Since the kidnappings… the barrier between them had been a fortress wall. The barrier had existed before that, growing year by year as her children grew; but before Gokna’s death, they could always reach over it. Now, it felt very strange to be sitting here alone with the General.

The silence stretched on, the two of them staring at each other and pretending not to. The air was stale and cold, as if the room had been shut for a long time. Hrunkner forced his attention to wander across the baroque tables and cabinets, all painted with a dozen colored varnishes. Practically every piece of woodwork looked a couple of generations old. Even the pillows and their embroidered fabric were in the overdone style of the Generation 58. Yet he could tell that Sherk really worked here. The perch on his right was by a desk littered with gadgets and papers. He recognized Underhill’s shaky penmanship in one title: “Videomancy for High Payload Steganography.”

Abruptly, the General broke the tense silence. “You did well, Sergeant.” She stood, and walked across the room to sit closer to him, on the perch in front of Sherk’s desk. “We had totally missed what the Kindred had discovered here. And we’d still be clueless if you hadn’t brought the matter up with Thract.”

“Rachner set up the operation, ma’am. He’s turned out to be a good officer.”

“Yes… I’d appreciate it if you’d let me do any follow-up on this with him.”

“Sure.” Need to know and all that.

And then there was more silence with nothing to say. Finally, Hrunkner waved at the absurd pillow furniture, the smallest worth a sergeant’s yearly salary. Except for Sherk’s desk, there was not a sign of either of his friends in this place. “You don’t come here often, do you?”

“No,” she said shortly. “Sherk wanted to see how people live after the Dark—and this is as near as we could get to it before we all do it ourselves. Besides, it seemed like a safe place to bring our youngest.” She looked at him defiantly.

How not to make an argument out of this? “Yes, well I’m glad you sent them home to Princeton. They’re… they’re good cobblies, ma’am, but this is not a good place for them. I had the strangest feeling down there on the bottom. The people were afraid, like the old stories about folks who don’t plan and then are left alone in the Dark. They don’t have any goal, and now it’s Dark.”

Smith sat a little lower on her perch. “We’ve got millions of years of evolution to battle; sometimes that’s harder to deal with than nuclear physics and the Honored Pedure. But people will get used to it.”

That was what Sherkaner Underhill would have said, all smiling and oblivious of the uneasiness around him. But Smith sounded more like a trooper in a hole, repeating the High Command’s assurances about enemy weakness. Suddenly he remembered how thoroughly she had shuttered every one of the windows. “You feel the same as I do about it, don’t you?”

For a moment he thought she would blow up. Instead, she sat inscrutably silent. Finally, “…You’re right, Sergeant. As I said, there’s a lot of instinct we’re running up against.” She shrugged. “Somehow, it doesn’t bother Sherkaner at all. Or rather, he knows the fear and it fascinates him, just another wonderful puzzle. Every day he goes down to the crater bottom and watches. He even mingles, bodyguards and guide-bug and all—you have to see it to believe it. He would have been down there all today if you hadn’t shown up with your own kind of fascinating puzzle.”

Unnerby smiled. “That’s Sherk for you.” Maybe he was on a safe topic. “Did you see how he lit up when we talked about my ‘magic rock dust’? I can’t wait to see what he does with it. What happens when you give a miracle to a miracle worker?”

Smith seemed to search for words. “We’ll figure out the rock dust, that’s certain. Eventually. But… hell, Hrunkner, you deserve to know. You’ve been with Sherk as long as I have. You noticed how his tremor is getting worse? The truth is, he’s not aging as well as most in your generation.”

“I noticed he’s frail, but look at all the results coming out of Princeton these days. He’s doing more than ever.”

“Yes. Indirectly. Over the years, he’s brought together a larger and larger circle of genius students. There are hundreds of them now, scattered all over the computer net.”

“…But all those papers by ‘Tom Lurksalot’? I thought that was Sherk and his students being coy.”

“That? No. That’s… that’s only his students being coy. They play anonymous games on the net; they make credit-taking into a guessing game. It’s just… silliness.”

Silly or not, it was amazingly productive. Over the last few years, “Tom Lurksalot” had provided breakthrough insights about everything from nucleonics to computer science to industrial standards. “It’s hard to believe. Just now, he seemed the same as always—mentally, I mean. The ideas seemed to come as fast as ever.” A dozen weird ideas a minute, when he’s on a roll. Unnerby smiled to himself, remembering. Flightiness, thy name is Underhill.

The General sighed, and her voice was soft and distant. She might have been talking about made-up storybook characters, not her own personal tragedy. “Sherk has had thousands of crazy ideas and hundreds of beautiful winners. But that’s… changed. My dear Sherkaner hasn’t come up with anything new in three years. He’s into videomancy these days, did you know that? He has all his old flamboyance, but…” Smith’s voice guttered into silence.

For almost forty years, Victory Smith and Sherkaner Underhill had been a team, Underhill producing an endless avalanche of ideas and Smith selecting the best and feeding them back to him. Sherk used to describe the process more colorfully, back when he thought artificial intelligence was the wave of the future: “I’m the idea-generating component and Victory is the crap-detector; we’re an intelligence greater than anything on ten legs.” These two had transformed the world.

But now… what if half the team had lost its genius? Sherk’s brilliant whimsy had kept the General on track as much as the reverse. Without Sherk, Victory Smith was left with her own assets: courage, strength, persistence. Was that enough?

Victory didn’t say anything more for a time. And Hrunkner wished that he could walk over and put his arms across her shoulders… but sergeants, even old sergeants, don’t do that to generals.

FORTY-TWO

The years had passed, and the danger had grown. More implacably than any human Pham had ever known, Reynolt kept searching and searching. As far as possible, he had avoided manipulating the zipheads. He had even arranged for his operations to continue while he was off-Watch; that was very risky, but it evaded the obvious correlations. It didn’t help. Now Reynolt seemed to have concrete suspicions. Pham’s tracers showed her searches intensifying, closing in on her suspect—most likely Pham Nuwen. There was no cure for it. However risky the operation, Anne must be eliminated. The open house for Nau’s new “office” might be the best chance Pham would get.

“North Paw” was what Tomas Nau called it. Most everybody else—certainly the Qeng Ho who did the engineering—called it simply the Lake Park. Now everyone on-Watch had their one opportunity to see the final result.

The last of the crowd was still trickling in when Nau appeared on the porch of his timbered lodge. He wore a glistening full-press jacket and green pants. “Keep your feet on the ground, people. My Qiwi has invented a whole special etiquette for North Paw.” He was smiling, and those in the crowd laughed. Gravity on Diamond One was more of a hint than a physical law. Around the lodge, the “ground” was cleverly textured grabfelt. So everyone did have feet on the ground, but their notion of vertical was only a vague consensus. Beside him on the porch, Qiwi was chuckling at the appearance of the hundreds of people standing before them, tilting this way and that like drunks. A black-furred kitten lay curled across the lace of her blouse.

Nau raised his hands again. “My people, my friends. This afternoon, please enjoy and admire what you have built here. And think about it. Thirty-eight years ago we nearly destroyed ourselves in battle and in treachery. For most of you, that time is not so long ago, just ten or twelve years on-Watch. You remember after that, how I said this was a time like the Plague Years on Balacrea. We had destroyed most of the resources we brought here, we had destroyed our starfaring capabilities. To survive, I said, we must put aside the animosities, and work together no matter how different our backgrounds…. Well, my friends, we did that. We are not out of physical danger; our destiny with the Spiders is still to be. But look around you, and you will see how we have healed ourselves.You all built this from the bare rock and ice and airsnow. This North Paw—Lake Park—is not large, but it is a work of highest art. Look upon it. You’ve made something that rivals the best that whole civilizations might create.

“I’m proud of you.” He reached out to slip his arm across Qiwi’s shoulders, displacing the kitten into the crook of Qiwi’s arm. Once upon a time, the relationship between Nau and Lisolet had been an ugly rumor. Now—Pham could see people smiling comfortably at the sight. “You see this is more than a park, more than a Podmaster’s sanctum. What you see here is evidence of something new in the universe, a melding of the best that Qeng Ho and Emergent have to offer. Emergent Focused persons—” Pham noticed that he still didn’t talk about the slaves as bluntly as he might. “—did the detailed planning for this park. Qeng Ho trade and individual action made it reality. And I personally have learned something: On Balacrea and Frenk and Gaspr, we Podmasters rule for the community good, but we rule largely by personal direction—and often by force of law. Here, working with you former Qeng Ho, I see another way. I know that the work on my park was accomplished as payback for that silly pink scrip you’ve been hiding from me for so long.” He raised a hand and several bills fluttered into the air. Laughter passed around the crowd again. “So! Think what the combination of Podmaster direction and Qeng Ho efficiency can do once we have completed our mission!”

He bowed to enthusiastic applause. Qiwi slipped in front of him, to stand at the porch railing—and the applause just got louder. The kitten, finally fed up with the noise and the jostling, jumped off Qiwi’s arm and sailed into the air over the crowd. It unfurled soft wings and slowed its upward trajectory, then curved back to circle over its mistress. “Take note,” Qiwi said to the crowd, “Miraowis allowed to fly here. But she has wings!” The cat made a mock dive at her, then flew off into the forest that grew all around the inland side of Nau’s lodge. “Now I invite you to the side of the Podmaster’s house for refreshments.”

Some of the visitors were already there. The rest shuffled round the pathways to trestled tables that bowed subtly downward, as if from the weight of the food that was set upon them. Pham moved along with everyone, loudly greeting anyone who would talk with him. It was important to establish his presence here in as many minds as possible. Meantime, in the back of his eyes, the view from his tiny spies built up the tactical picture of the park and the forest.

Cultures clashed at the food tables, but by now Benny’s parlor had established an etiquette for going after food. In a few moments, most people had their first buckets and bottles full of refreshment, and spread back into the open. Pham walked up behind Benny and slapped him on the back. “Benny! This stuff is good! But I thought you were supplying.”

Benny Wen swallowed, coughing. “Of course it’s good. And of course it’s mine—and Gonle’s.” He nodded at the former quartermaster clerk who was standing beside him. “Actually, Qiwi’s father sprouted some new stuff he found in the libraries. We’ve had it for about half a year now, saving it for this party.”

Pham puffed himself up: “I did my part out-of-doors. Someone had to supervise the added drilling and the meltwater for the Podmaster’s lake.”

Gonle Fong showed her mercenary smile. More than any Qeng Ho—in a way more than Qiwi herself—Fong bought into Tomas Nau’s “cooperative vision.” Gonle had done very well by doing good. “Everybody got something out of this. My farms are openly endorsed by the Podmaster now. And I’ve got real automation.”

“You have something better than a keyboard now?” Pham said slyly.

“You bet. And today, I’m in charge of services.” She lifted her hand dramatically and a food tray floated docilely over to them. It rotated beneath her hand, bobbed politely as she grabbed at spiced seaweed. Then it moved to Benny and then Pham. Pham’s little spies looked at the gadget from all directions. The tray maneuvered on tiny gas jets, almost silently. It was mechanically simple, but it moved with grace and intelligence. Benny noticed too. “It’s controlled by a Focused person?” he said, sounding a little sad.

“Um, yes. The Podmaster thought it worthwhile, considering the event.” Pham watched the other trays. They swept in wide circles, out from the food tables, picking out just the guests who hadn’t been fed.Clever. The slaves were kept diplomatically offstage, and people could pretend what Nau had often declared, that Focus took civilization to a higher level.ButNau is right! Damn him.

Pham said something appropriately truculent to Gonle Fong, words that showed that “old fart Trinli” was truly impressed but determined not to admit it. He walked out from the center of the crowd, apparently intent on food.Hmm. Ritser Brughel was off-Watch just now—another cleverness of Tomas Nau. Many people bought into some part of Nau’s “vision” nowadays, but Ritser Brughel could unnerve even the fully converted. But if Brughel was off-Watch, and if Nau and Reynolt were diverting rote-layer zipheads to manual serving… this was a chance even better than he had thought.So where is Reynolt? The woman could be surprisingly hard to track; sometimes she dropped off Brughel’s direct monitor list for Ksecs at a time. Pham pushed his attention outward. There were millions of the tiny particles scattered throughout the park. The ones stabilizing the lake and running the ventilators were mostly tasked, but that still left immense processing power. No way he could handle all the viewpoints and images. As his mind swept back and forth though the park, he was vaguely aware that he was swaying on his feet.Aha, there! Not a close view, but there inside Nau’s lodge, he had a glimpse of Reynolt’s red hair and pinkish skin. As expected, the woman wasn’t participating in the festivities. She was hunched over an Emergent input pad, her eyes hidden behind stark black huds. She looked the same as ever. Tense, intense, as if on the verge of some deadly insight.And for all I know, she is.

Someone whacked him on the shoulder, as hard as he had struck Benny a few moments earlier. “So Pham, my man, what do you think?”

Pham pushed away the inner visions and looked around at his assailant: Trud Silipan had dressed up for the event. His uniform was like nothing he’d seen except in some Emergent historicals: blue silk, fringed and tasseled, and somehow imitating torn, stained rags. It was the dress of the First Followers, Trud had once told him. Pham let his surprise become exaggerated. “What do I think about what—your uniform or the view?”

“The view, the view! I’m in uniform just because this is such a milestone. You heard the Podmaster’s speech. Go ahead, you take a few more moments. Take in the view of Lake Park, and tell me what you think.”

Behind them, Pham’s inner vision showed Ezr Vinh bearing down on them.Damn. “Well—”

“Yes, what do you think, Armsman Trinli?” Vinh walked around till he stood facing them. He looked straight into Pham’s eyes for an instant. “Of all the Qeng Ho here, you are the oldest, most traveled. Of all of us, you must have the deepest experience. How does the Podmaster’s North Paw compare to the great parks of the Qeng Ho?”

Vinh’s words had a double meaning that went unnoticed by Trud Silipan, but Pham felt an instant of cold rage.You’re part of the reason I haveto kill Anne Reynolt, you little jerk. Nau’s “true” histories of Pham Nuwen had eaten into the boy. For at least a year now, it was clear that he understood the true story of Brisgo Gap. And he guessed what Pham really wanted with Focus. His demands for guarantees and reassurance had become more and more pointed.

The localizers painted false-color images of Ezr Vinh’s face, showed his blood pressure and skin temperature. Could a good ziphead snoop look at such pictures and guess that the boy was playing some kind of game? Maybe. The boy’s hate for Nau and Brughel still outweighed his feelings against Pham Nuwen; Pham could still use him. But he was one more reason why Reynolt must be removed.

The thoughts passed through Pham’s mind even as his mouth twisted into a self-satisfied smirk. “Putting it that way, my boy, you’re absolutely right. Book learning can’t compare to traveling the light-years and seeing the sights with your own two eyes.” He turned away from them and looked down the footpath, past the lodge, to the moorage and the lake beyond.Pretend to be thoughtfully considering.

He had spent Msecs invisibly prowling this construction; it should have been easy to play his proper role. But standing here, he could feel the air drifting slowly out of the trees behind him. It was moist, faintly chill, with a tarry scent that whispered of a thousand kilometers of forest stretching out behind him. Sunlight came warm through high patchy clouds. That, too, was fake. Nowadays, the real sun was not as bright as a decent moon. But the light systems embedded in the diamond sky could imitate almost any visual effect. The only clue to the fakery was the faint shimmering rainbows that arched across the farther distances….

Down the hill from him was the lake itself. That was Qiwi’s triumph. The water was real, thirty meters deep in places. Qiwi’s network of servos and localizers kept it stable, the surface flat and smooth, reflecting clouds and blue from overhead. The Podmaster’s lodge overlooked a moorage that sat at the head of an inlet. The inlet spread and spread. Kilometers out—actually less than two hundred meters—two rocky islands rose from the mists, guarding the far shore.

The place was a Lord-blessed masterpiece. “It’s atresartnis, “ said Pham, but he made the word sound like an insult.

Silipan frowned. “What—?”

Ezr said, “It’s parkbuilder jargon. It means—”

“Oh, yes. I’ve heard the word: a park or a bonsai that goes to extremes.” Trud puffed up defensively. “Well, it is extreme; the Podmaster pushed for that. Look! An enormous microgravity park, perfectly imitating a planetary surface. It breaks a lot of aesthetic rules—yet knowing when to break the rules is the mark of a great Podmaster.”

Pham shrugged, and continued to munch on Gonle’s refreshments. He turned idly and looked up into the forest. The crest of the hill matched the true wall of the cavern, a standard parkbuilder trick. The trees stood ten and twenty meters tall, moss glistening cool and dark on their long trunks. Ali Lin had grown them on wires in incubator tents on Diamond One’s surface. A year ago they had been three-centimeter seedlings. Now, by Ali’s magic, these trees might have been centuries old. Here and there, dead wood of “older” forest generations lay gray within the blue and green. There were parkbuilders who could achieve such perfection from a single viewpoint. But Pham’s hidden eyes looked from all directions, throughout the forest. The Podmaster’s park was such a perfection at every level. Cubic meter for cubic meter it was as perfect as the finest Namqem bonsai.

“So,” said Silipan, “I think you see why I have reason to be proud! Podmaster Nau provided the vision, but it was my work with system automation that guided the implementation.”

Pham sensed the anger building in Ezr Vinh. No doubt he could contain it, but a good snoop would still pick it up. Pham punched Ezr lightly on the shoulder and gave the braying laugh that was a Trinli trademark. “Did you get that, Ezr? Trud, what you mean is the Focused persons you supervise did this.” And supervise was too strong a word. Silipan was more of a custodian, but saying that would be an insult Trud could not forgive.

“Er, yes, the zipheads. Isn’t that what I said?”

Rita Liao approached from the crowd around the tables. She was carrying food for two. “Anyone seen Jau? This place is so big you can lose someone.”

“Haven’t seen him,” said Pham.

“The flight tech? I think he went around the other side of the lodge”—this from an Emergent, someone whose name Pham should not know. Nau and Qiwi had arranged an intersection of Watches for this open house so that there were some near-strangers in the crowd.

“Well, pus. I should just bounce off the ceiling and take a look.” But even in the present mellow circumstances, Rita Liao was a good Emergent Follower. She kept her feet squarely on the gripping ground as she turned to scan the crowd. “Qiwi!” she shouted. “Have you seen my Jau?”

Qiwi detached herself from the group around Tomas Nau and shuffled up the walk toward them. “Yes,” she said. Pham noticed Ezr Vinh backing off, heading for another group. “Jau didn’t believe the pier was real, so I suggested he go take a look.”

“It’s real? The boat, too?”

“Sure. Come on down. I’ll show you.” The five of them walked down the path. Silipan strutted along in his silken rags, waving at others to follow. “See what we’ve done here!”

Pham sent his inner gaze ahead, studying the rocks around the pier, the bushes that leaned out over the water. This Balacrean vegetation was beautiful in a stark way that fit with the cool air. And the entrance to the utility tunnel was hidden in the cliff behind the blue-green fronds.Thismay be my best chance. Pham walked next to Qiwi, asking questions that hopefully would mark his presence later. “You can actually sail in it?”

Qiwi smiled. “See for yourself.”

Rita Liao made an exaggerated shivering sound. “It’s cold enough to be real. North Paw is pretty, but can’t you redial for something tropical?”

“No,” said Silipan. He hurried to walk in front of them and lecture. “It’s too real for that. Ali Lin’s whole point was realism and detail.” Now that Qiwi was present, he spoke of the zipheads like human beings.

The path wound back and forth, realistic switchbacks that took them down the rocky face of the harbor wall. Most of the guests were following, curious to see what this moorage could really be.

“Water looks awfully flat,” someone said.

“Yes,” said Qiwi. “Realistic waves are the hardest part. Some of my father’s friends are working on that. If we can form the water surface on a short scale both in time and—” There was startled laughter as a trio of winged kittens zipped low and fast over their heads. The three skimmed out across the water, then climbed into the sky like strafing aircraft.

“I’ll bet you they don’t havethat at the real North Paw!”

Qiwi laughed. “True. That was my price!” She smiled up at Pham. “Remember the kittens we had in the pre-Flight temp? When I was little—” She looked around, searching for a face in the crowd. “When I was little, someone gave me one for a pet.”

There was still a little girl inside, who remembered other times. Pham ignored the wistfulness in her voice. His words came out bluff and patronizing. “Flying kittens don’t have real significance. If you’d wanted a solid symbol, you’d have wombed some flying pigs.”

“Pigs?” Trud stumbled, almost lost his stride. “Oh yeah, the ‘noble winged pig.’ “

“Yes, the spirit of programming. There are winged pigs in all the grandest temps.”

“Yeah, sure… just get me an umbrella!” Trud shook his head, and some of those behind him were laughing. The flying pig mythos had never caught on at Balacrea.

Qiwi smiled at the byplay. “Maybe we should—I don’t think I’ll ever convince the kitties to scavenge floating trash.”

In less than two hundred seconds, the crowd had ranged itself along the water’s edge. Pham drifted away from Qiwi and Trud and Rita. He moved as if seeking the best vantage point. In fact, he was coming closer to the cover of the blue-green fronds. With any luck, there would be some excitement in the next few moments. Surely some fool would fall off the ground. He began a final security sweep across the localizer net….

Rita Liao was no fool, but when she saw where Jau Xin was, she got a little careless. “Jau, what in Plague’s Name are you doing—” She handed her food and drink to someone behind her and rushed out onto the pier. The boat there had slipped free, was sliding smoothly out into the inlet. Like the lodge and the pier, it was dark timber. But this wood was tarred near the boat’s waterline, varnished and painted at the gunnels and prow. A Balacrean sail was hoisted on its single mast. Jau Xin grinned at the crowd from his seat amidships.

“Jau Xin, you come back here! That’s the Podmaster’s boat. You’ll—” Rita started running down the pier. She realized her mistake and tried to stop herself. When her feet left the ground she was moving at just a few centimeters per second. She floated off the platform, a-spin and embarrassed, and loudly angry. If no one snagged her, she would sail over her errant husband’s head, and come down in the lake a few hundred seconds later.

Time to move. His programs told him no one in the crowd was watching. His probes into Nau’s security showed that no snoop was on him right now, and he had a glimpse of Reynolt still working at some drudge task back in the lodge. He blinded the localizers for an instant and stepped into the fronds. Just a little massaging of the digital record and there’d be proof he was here the whole time. He could do what was necessary and get back unnoticed. It was still as dangerous as hell, even if Brughel’s snoops were not on alert.But taking out Reynolt is necessary.

Pham finger-walked up the cliff face, slowed by the need to stay hidden behind the bushes. Even here, the artistry of Ali Lin was evident. The cliff could have been simple raw diamond, but Ali had imported rocks from the mineral dumps on the surface of the L1 jumble. They were discolored as if etched by the seepage of a thousand years. The rock was watercolor art as great as any ever painted on paper or digital. Ali Lin had been a first-rank parkbuilder before the expedition to OnOff. Sammy Park had picked Ali for the crew for that reason. But in the years since his Focus, he had become something greater, what a human could become if all his mind was concentrated on a single love. What he and his fellows had done was subtle and deep… and as much as anything it proved the power that Focus gave to the culture that possessed it.Using it is right.

The tunnel entrance was still a few meters farther up. Pham sensed a half-dozen localizers floating there, imaging the outlines of the door.

A small fraction of his attention remained with the crowd back at the harbor. No eyes looked back in his direction. Some of the nimbler partyers had scrambled out onto the pier and formed a chain of life that reached six or seven meters into the air, an acrobatic tumble of humanity. The men and women of the chain were in a dozen different orientations, the classic zero-gee pose for such an operation. It broke the illusion of downness, and some of the Emergents looked away, groaning. Imagining the sea as flat and down was one thing. Suddenly seeing the sea as a watery cliff or a ceiling was enough to provoke nausea.

But then the tip of the chain extended a hand and grabbed Rita’s ankle. The chain contracted, bringing her back to the ground. Pham tapped his palm, and the audio from the scene below came louder in his ear. Jau Xin was beginning to get embarrassed. He apologized to his wife. “But Qiwi said it was okay. And face it, I am a space pilot.”

“A pilotmanager, Jau. It’s not the same thing.”

“Close enough. I can do some things without a ziphead to make it right.” Jau sat back down by the mast. He tweaked the sail a little. The boat moved out around the pier. It stayed level in the water. Maybe suction was keeping it fitted to the surface. But its wake rose a half meter into the air, twisting and braiding the way surface tension makes free water do. The crowd applauded—even Rita, now—and Jau swung the craft around, trying to make it back to the moorage.

Pham pulled himself even with the tunnel entrance. His remotes had already been fiddling with the hatch.Everything in this park was localizer-compatible, thank the Lord. The door opened silently. And when he drifted through, he had no trouble closing it behind him.

He had maybe two hundred seconds.

He pushed quickly up the narrow tunnel. Here there was no illusion. These walls were raw crystal, the naked stuff of Diamond One. Pham pushed faster. The maps that unrolled before his eyes showed what he had seen before. Tomas Nau intended the Lake Park to be his central site; after this open house, outsider visits would be strictly limited. Nau had used the last of the thermal diggers to cut these narrow tunnels. They gave him direct physical access to the critical resources of Hammerfest.

Pham’s tiny spies showed him to be just thirty meters short of the new entrance to the Focus clinic. Nau and Reynolt were safely at the party. All the MRI techs were at the party or off-Watch. He would have his time in the clinic, enough time for some sabotage. Pham twisted head for feet, and extended his hands as brakes against the walls.

Sabotage?Be honest. It was murder.No, it’s an execution. Or a combatdeath upon an enemy. Pham had killed his share in combat, and not always at the end of a ship-to-ship trajectory.This is no different. So what if Reynolt was a Focused automaton now, a slave to Nau? There had been a time when her evil had been self-aware. Pham had learned enough about the Xevalle clique to know that its villainy was not just the invention of those who had destroyed it. There had been a time when Anne Reynolt had been like Ritser Brughel, though doubtless more effective. In appearance, the two could have been twins: pale-skinned, reddish-haired, with cold, killing eyes. Pham tried to catch the image, amplify it in his mind. Someday he would overthrow the Nau/Brughel regime. Someday Pham would invade theInvisible Hand and end the horror that Brughel had made there.What I doto Anne Reynolt is no different.

And Pham realized he was floating in front of the clinic entrance, his fingers poised to command it open.How much time have I wasted? The time line he kept at the edge of his vision said only two seconds.

He tapped his fingers angrily. The door slid open, and he floated through into the silent room. The clinic was brightly lit, but the vision behind his eyes was suddenly dark and vacant. He moved cautiously, like a man suddenly struck blind. The localizers from the tunnel, and what he shook out from his clothing, spread out around him, slowly giving him back his vision. He moved quickly to the MRI control table, trying to ignore the absence of vision in the corners and dead spaces. The clinic was one place where the localizers could not survive long-term. When the big magnets were pulsed on, they fried the electronics in the localizers. Trud had taken to vacuuming them out after a magnet-accelerated dustmote had cut his ear.

But Pham Nuwen had no intention of pulsing the magnets, and his little spies would stay alive and well for the time it took him to set his trap. He moved across the room, quickly cataloguing the gear. As always, the clinic was an orderly maze of pale cabinets. Here wireless was not an option. Optical cables and short laser links connected automation to magnets. Superconducting power cables snaked back into areas he couldn’t see yet.Ah. His localizers drifted near the controller cabinet. It was set just the way Trud had left it the last time he had been here. Nowadays, Pham spent many Ksecs each Watch with Trud in the clinic. Pham Trinli had never seemed pointedly curious about the workings of the Focus gear, but Trud liked to brag and Pham was gradually learning more and more.

Focus could kill easily enough. Pham floated above the alignment coils. The inner region of the MRI was less than fifty centimeters across, not even big enough for whole-body imaging. But this gear was for the head only, and imaging was only part of the game. It was the bank of high-frequency modulators that made this different from any conventional imagers. Under program control—programs mostly maintained by Anne Reynolt, despite Trud’s claims—the modulators could tweak and stimulate the Focus virus in the victim’s head. Millimeter by cubic millimeter the mindrot could be orchestrated in their psychoactive secretion. Even done perfectly, the disease had to be retuned every few Msecs, or the ziphead would drift into catatonia or hyperactivity. Small errors could produce dysfunction—about a quarter of Trud’s work had to be redone. Moderate errors could easily destroy memory. Large errors could provoke a massive stroke, the victim dying even faster than Xopi Reung had.

Anne Reynolt was due for such a massive cerebral accident the next time she retuned herself.

He’d been gone from the Lake Park for almost one hundred seconds. Jau Xin was taking small groups for rides in the boat. Someone had finally fallen in the lake.Good. That will buy more time.

Pham pulled the hood off the controller box. There were interfaces to the superconductors. Things like that could fail, on rare occasions with no warning. Weaken the switch, tweak the management programs to recognize Reynolt when next she used the gear on herself….

Since he’d entered the clinic, the active localizers he’d brought with him had spread across the clinic. It was a little like light spreading farther and farther into absolute dark, revealing more and more of the room. He’d set the images at a low priority while he examined the SC switch with nearly microscopic vision.

A flicker of motion.He glimpsed a pants leg passing near one of the background views. Someone was hiding in the dead space behind the cabinets. Pham oriented on the localizers and dived for the open space above the cabinets.

A woman’s voice: “Grab a stop and freeze!”

It was Anne Reynolt. She emerged from between the cabinets, just beyond where he could reach. She was holding a pointing device as though it were some kind of weapon.

Reynolt steadied herself on the ceiling and waggled the pointer at him. “Hand over hand, walk yourself back to the wall.”

For an instant, Pham teetered on the edge of a frontal attack. The pointer could be a bluff, but even if it were guiding a cannon, what did it matter? The game was up. The only option left was swift and overwhelming violence, here and with the localizers all across Hammerfest.And maybe not… Pham retreated as instructed.

Reynolt came out from behind the cabinets. She hooked a foot under a restraint. The pointer in her hand did not waver. “So. Mr. Pham Trinli. It’s nice to finally know.” With her free hand, she brushed her hair back from her face. Her huds were clear, and he had a good view into her eyes. There was something strange about her. Her face was as pale and cold as always, but the usual impatience and indifference was overlaid with a kind of triumph, a conscious arrogance. And… there was a smile, faint yet unmistakable, on her lips.

“You set me up, Anne, didn’t you?” Back at Nau’s lodge, he took another, longer look at what he thought had been Anne Reynolt. It was a patch of wallpaper, lying loosely on a bed. She had blinded the eyes that could get really close, and fooled him with a crude video.

She nodded. “I didn’t know tas you, but yes. It’s been clear for a long time that someone was manipulating my systems. At first, I thought it was Ritser or Kal Omo, playing political games. You were an outside bet, the fellow who was too often in the middle of things. First you were an old fool, then an old slavemaster in hiding as a fool. Now I see that you are something more, Mr. Trinli. Did you really think you could outsmart the Podmaster’s systems forever?”

“I—” Pham’s vision swept out of the room, roamed across Lake Park. The party was continuing. Tomas Nau himself and Qiwi had joined Jau Xin on the little sailboat. Pham zoomed in on Nau’s face: he was not wearing huds. He was not a man overseeing an ambush.He doesn’t know! “I was very afraid I couldn’t outsmart his systems forever—you, in particular.”

She nodded. “I guessed whoever-it-was would target me. I’m the critical component.” She glanced briefly away from him, at the uncovered controller box. “You knew I was retuning in the next Msec, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” And you need retuning more than I knew. Hope surged in him. She was behaving like a character in an idiot adventure. She hadn’t told her boss what she was up to. She probably had no backups. And now she was just floating there, talking!Keep her talking. “I figured I could weaken the SC switches. When you used the device, it would jam high and—”

“—And I’d have a capillary blowout? Very crude, very fatal, Mr. Trinli. But then, you’re not clever enough to try real reprogramming, are you?”

“No.” How far out of calibration is she? Hit at emotion. “Besides, I wanted you dead. You and Nau and Brughel are the only real monsters here. For now, you’re the only one I can reach.”

Her smile widened. “You’re crazy.”

“No,you are. Once upon a time you were a Podmaster just like them. Your problem is you lost. Or don’t you remember? The Xevalle clique?”

Her arrogant smile vanished and for a moment her gaze was the usual frowning indifference. Then she was smiling again. “I remember very well. You’re right, I was a loser—but tas a century before Xevalle, and I was fighting all the Podmasters.” She advanced slowly across the room. Her pointer never wavered from Pham’s chest. “The Emergents had invaded Frenk. I was an ancient-lit major at Arnham University…. I learned to be other things. For fifteen years we fought them. They had technology, they had Focus. At first, we had numbers. We lost and lost, but we made them pay for every victory. Toward the end we were better-armed, but by then there were so few of us. And still we fought.”

The look in her eyes was… joyous. He was hearing the history of Frenk from the other side. “You—you’re the Frenkisch Orc!”

Reynolt’s smile broadened and she came even nearer, her slim body straightening out of zero-gee crouch. “Yes indeed. The Podmasters wisely decided to rewrite the histories. The ‘Frenkisch Orc’ makes a better villain than ‘Anne of Arnham.’ Rescuing Frenks from a mutant subspecies makes a better story than massacre and Focus.”

Lord.But some automatic part of him still remembered why he was here. He slid his feet back along the wall, positioning for a kick-lunge.

Reynolt stopped her approach. She lowered her aim, to his knees. “Don’t try it, Mr. Trinli. This pointer is guiding a program in the MRI controller. If you had had a moment more, you would have seen the nickel pellets I put in the magnet target area. It’s an ad hoc weapon, but good enough to blow your legs off—and you would still face interrogation.”

Pham sent his vision back into the MRI gear. Yes, there were the pellets. Given a proper magnetic pulse, they would be high-velocity buckshot. But the program, if it was in the controller… Tiny eyes swept along the superconductor interface. He had enough localizers to talk through the optical link and wipe her pointer program.She still doesn’t know what Ican do with them! The hope was like a bright flame.

He tapped his fingers on the palms of his hands, maneuvering the devices into place. Hopefully, it would look like nervous gesturing to Reynolt. “Interrogation? You’re still loyal to Nau?”

“Of course. How could it be otherwise?”

“But you’re working behind his back.”

“Only to serve him better. If this had turned out to be Ritser Brughel’s work, I wanted a complete case before going to my Podmas—”

Pham lunged outward from the wall. He heard Reynolt’s pointer click uselessly, and then he slammed into her. The two of them tumbled back into the MRI cabinets. Reynolt fought almost silently, slamming her knee into him, trying to bite at his throat. But he had her arms pinned, and as they sailed past the magnet box, he twisted and slammed her head against the cover plate.

Reynolt went limp. Pham caught himself on a stop, ready to smash her again.

Think.The party at North Paw was still going on, an idyll. Pham’s timer showed that 250 seconds had passed since he had left the harbor.I canstill make this work! There were necessary changes. The blow to Reynolt’s head would show up on an autopsy…. But—miracles!—her clothes showed no sign of the struggle. There would have to be some changes. He reached into the MRI target area and swept the nickel pellets into a safety bin…. Something like his original plan could still work. Suppose she had been trying to recalibrate the controllers and had an accident?

Pham moved her body carefully into position. He held her tightly, watching for any sign of consciousness.

The monster. The Frenkisch Orc. Of course, Anne Reynolt was neither. She was a tall, slender woman—as much a human as Pham Nuwen or any of the far descendants of Earth.

Now the carven legends on the Hammerfest walls had a clear translation. For years and years, Anne Reynolt had fought against Focus, her people driven back step by step, to that last redoubt in the mountains. Anne of Arnham. Now all that remained was the myth of a twisted monster… and the real monsters like Ritser Brughel, the descendants of the surviving Frenks, the conquered and the Focused.

But Anne of Arnham had not died. Instead, her genius had been Focused. And now it was deadly danger to Pham and all he worked for. And so she must die….

…Three hundred seconds.Wake up. Pham tapped out instructions. Botched. He typed them again. Once he weakened the SC connectors, this little program would be enough. It was a simple thing, a coded beat of high-frequency pulses that would turn the bugs in Anne’s head into little factories, flooding her brain with vasoconstrictors, creating millions of tiny aneurisms. It would be quick. It would be lethal. And Trud had claimed so many times that none of their operations were physically painful.

Unconscious, Anne’s face had relaxed; she might have been asleep. There were no marks, no bruises. Even the slender silver chain around her throat, even that had survived their struggle, though it had been pulled free of her blouse. There was a ’membrance gem at the end of the chain. Pham couldn’t help himself. He reached over her shoulder and squeezed the greenish stone. The pressure was enough to power a moment of imagery. The stone cleared, and Pham was looking down on a mountain hillside. His viewpoint seemed to be on the cupola of an armored flyer. Ranged around the hillside were a half-dozen other such vehicles, dragons come down from the sky to point their energy cannons at what was already ruins, and the entrance to a cave. In front of the guns stood a single figure, a red-haired young woman. Trud said that ’membrance gems were moments of great happiness or ultimate triumph. And maybe the Emergent taking the picture thought this was such a moment. The girl in the picture—and it was clearly Anne Reynolt—had lost. Whatever she guarded in the cave behind her would be taken from her. And yet, she stood straight, her eyes looking up into the viewpoint. In a moment she would be brushed aside, or blown away… but she had not surrendered.

Pham let the gem go, and for a long moment he stared without seeing. Then slowly, carefully, he tapped a long control sequence. This would be much trickier. He altered the drug menu, hesitated… seconds… before entering an intensity. Reynolt would lose some recent memory, hopefully thirty or forty Msec. And then you will begin closing in on me again.

He tapped “execute.” The SC cables behind the cabinet creaked and spread apart from each other, delivering enormous and precise currents to the MRI magnets. A second passed. His inner vision sputtered into blindness. Reynolt spasmed in his arms. He held her close, keeping her head away from the sides of the cabinet.

Her twitching subsided after a few seconds; her breath came relaxed and slow. Pham eased himself away from her.Move her out from the magnets. Okay. He touched her hair, brushing it away from her face. Nothing like that red hair had existed on Canberra… but Anne Reynolt reminded him of someone from a certain Canberra morning.

He fled blindly from the room, down the tunnel, back to the party by the lake.

FORTY-THREE

The open house at North Paw was the high point of the Watch, of any Watch to date. There wouldn’t be anything so spectacular until the end of the Exile. Even the Qeng Ho who had made the park possible were amazed that so much could be done with such limited resources. Maybe there was something to Tomas Nau’s claims about Focused systems and Qeng Ho initiative.

The party wound on for Ksecs after Jau Xin’s frolic. At least three people ended up in the water. For a while there were meter-wide droplets wobbling above the lake. The Podmaster asked his guests to come back to the lodge and let the water settle itself. The favors of hundreds of people over a year had been expended on the party supplies, and the usual fools—including, most spectacularly, Pham Trinli—got very drunk.

Finally, the guests straggled out and the doors in the hillside were closed behind them. Privately, Ezr was sure this would be the last time the riffraff were invited into the Podmaster’s domain. The riffraff had made the party possible, and Qiwi had obviously enjoyed every second of it, but Tomas Nau was beginning to fray toward the end of the party. The bastard was a clever one. For the price of one tedious afternoon, the Podmaster had gotten more goodwill than ever. A few decades of tyranny couldn’t make Qeng Ho forget their heritage… but Nau had made their situation an ambiguous kind of not-tyranny.Focus is slavery. But Tomas Nau promised to free the zipheads at the end of the Exile. Ezr shouldn’t hate the Qeng Ho for accepting the situation. Many otherwise free societies accepted parttime slavery.In any case, Nau’s promise is a lie.

Anne Reynolt’s unconscious body was found 4Ksecs after the end of the party. All the next day, there were rumors and panics: Reynolt was really brain-dead, some said, and the announcements were simply soft lies. Ritser Brughel hadn’t been in coldsleep, others claimed, and now he had staged a coup. Ezr had his own theory.After all the years, Pham Nuwenhas finally acted.

Twenty Ksec into the workday, the ziphead support for two of the research teams fell into deadlock, a temperamental snit that Reynolt could have cleared in a few seconds. Phuong and Silipan whacked at the problem for 6Ksecs, then announced that the zipheads involved would be down for the rest of the day. No, they weren’t translators—but Trixia had been working with one of them, some kind of geologist. Ezr tried to go over to Hammerfest.

“You’re not on my list, buddy.” There was actually a guard at the taxi port, one of Omo’s goons. “Hammerfest is off-limits.”

“For how long?”

“Dunno. Read the announcements, will you.”

And so Ezr ended up in Benny’s parlor, along with a mob and a half of other people. Ezr wedged down at the table with Jau and Rita. Pham was there, too, looking decidedly hungover.

Jau Xin had his own tale of woe: “Reynolt was supposed to retune my pilots. Not a big deal, but our drills went like crap without it.”

“What are you complaining about? Your gear is still functioning, right? But we were trying to do an analysis of this Spider spaceflight stuff—and now our ziphead allocation is offline. Hey, I know bits of chemistry and engineering, but there’s no way I can put it all to—”

Pham groaned loudly. He was holding his head with both hands. “Quit your bitching. This all makes me wonder about Emergent ‘superiority.’ One person gets knocked out and your house of cards comes apart. Where’s the superiority in that?”

Normally Rita Liao was a gentle sort, but the look she gave Pham was venomous. “You Qeng Ho murdered our superiority, remember? When we came here we had ten times the clinical staff we have now, enough to make our systems as good as anything back home.”

There was an embarrassed silence. Pham glared back at Rita, but didn’t argue further. After a moment he gave the abrupt shrug that everyone recognized: Trinli was bested, but unwilling to retreat or apologize.

A voice from the next table broke the silence. “Hey, Trud!”

Silipan was standing halfway through the parlor doorway, looking up at them. He was still wearing the Emergent dress uniform of the day before, but now the silken rags had new stains, and they were not artistic tints.

The silence dissolved, people shouting questions, inviting Trud to come up and talk to them. Trud climbed up through the vines toward Jau Xin’s table. There was no room left, so they flipped another table over to make a double-decker. Now Ezr was almost eye to eye with Silipan, even though the other’s face was inverted from his. The crowd from other tables swarmed in close, anchoring themselves among the vines.

“So when are you going to break that deadlock, Trud? I’ve got zipheads reserved, waiting for answers.”

“Yeah, why are you over here when—”

“—There’s only so much we can do with raw hardware, and—”

“Lord of Trade Almighty, give the fellow a chance!” Pham’s voice boomed, loud and irritated. It was a typical Trinli turnabout, always the truculent cannon, but pointing in whatever direction might make him look good. It also, Ezr noticed, silenced the crowd.

Silipan sent Pham a grateful look. The technician’s cockiness was a fragile thing today. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his hand shook slightly as he raised the drink Benny had set before him.

“How is she, Trud?” Jau asked the question in sympathetic, quiet tones. “We heard… we heard, she’s brain-dead.”

“No, no.” Trud shook his head and smiled weakly. “Reynolt should make a full recovery, minus maybe a year of retrograde amnesia. Things will be a bit chaotic till we get her back online. I’m sorry about the deadlock. Why, I’d have it fixed by now”—some of the old confidence crept back into his voice—“but I was reassigned to something more important.”

“What really happened to her?”

Benny showed up with a shrimp-tentacle dinner, his best entree. Silipan dug in hungrily, seeming to ignore the question. This was the most attentive audience Trud had ever had, literally breathless to hear his opinions. Ezr could tell the guy realized this, that he was enjoying his sudden and central importance. At the same time, Trud was almost too tired to see straight. His once perfect uniform actually stank. His fork took a wobbling course from food bucket to mouth. After a few moments, he turned a bleary-eyed look in the direction of his questioner. “What happened? We’re not sure. The last year or so, Reynolt’s been slipping—still in Focus, of course, but not well tuned. Tas a subtle thing, something that only a pro could notice. I almost missed it myself. She seemed to be caught up on some subproject—you know the way zipheads can obsess. Only thing is, Reynolt does her own calibration, so there was nothing I could do. I tell you, tas making me damn uneasy. I was about to report it to the Podmaster when—”

Trud hesitated, seemed to realize that this was a brag with consequences. “Anyway, it looks like she was trying to adjust some of the MRI control circuits. Maybe she knew that her tuning was adrift. I don’t know. She had the safety hood off and was running diagnostics. It looks like there was some kind of situational flaw in the control software; we’re still trying to reproduce that. Anyway, she got a control pulse right in the face. There was a little piece of her scalp in the cabinet behind the controls, where she spasmed. Fortunately, the stimulated drug production was alpha-retrox. She has a concussion and a retrox overdose…. Like I say, it’s all repairable. Another forty days and our old lovable Reynolt will be back.” He laughed weakly.

“Minus some recent memories.”

“Of course. Zipheads aren’t hardware; I don’t have backups.”

There was some uncomfortable mumbling around the table, but it was Rita Liao who put the idea into words: “It’s all too convenient. It’s like someone wanted to shut her down.” She hesitated. Earlier in the day, it had been Rita pushing the rumors about Ritser Brughel. It showed how far these Emergents had come that they would stick their noses into what might be a Podmaster conflict. “Has Podmaster Nau checked into the off-Watch status of the Vice-Podmaster?”

“And his agents?” That from a Qeng Ho behind Ezr.

Trud slapped his fork down on the table. His voice came out angry and squeaky. “What do you think! The Podmaster is looking into the possibilities… very carefully.” He took a deep breath, and seemed to realize that the price of fame was too high. “You can be absolutely sure that the Podmaster is taking this seriously. But look—the retrox flood was simply a massive overdose, unlocalized, just what you’d expect in an accident. The amnesia will be a patchy thing. Any saboteur doing that would be a fool. She could be dead and it would’ve looked just as much like an accident.”

For a moment, everyone was silent. Pham glared back and forth at all of them.

Silipan picked up his fork, set it down again. He stared into his half-finished bucket of shrimp tentacles. “Lord, I am so tired. I go back on duty in twenty—damn it, fifteen—Ksecs.”

Rita reached out to pat his arm. “Well, I’m glad you came over and gave us the straight story.” There was a murmur of agreement from the people all around.

“Bil and I will be running the show for some time now. It all depends on us.” Trud looked from face to face, seeking comfort. His voice boasted and quailed at the same time.

They met later that day, in the buffer space beneath the temp’s outer skin. This was a meeting agreed on long before the Lake Park open house. It was a meeting Ezr had waited for with impatience and fear—the meeting where he would lay it on the line to Pham Nuwen about Focus.I have mylittle speech, my little threats to make. Will they be enough?

Ezr moved quietly past Fong’s sproutling trays. The bright lights and the smell of trebyun greens faded behind him. The dark that was left was too deep for unaided eyes. Eight years ago, on his first meeting with Nuwen, there had been faint sunlight. Now the hull plastic showed only darkness.

But nowadays, Ezr had other ways to see…. He signaled the localizer that sat on his temple. A ghostly vision rose. The colors were just shades of yellow, such as you might see if you pressed your finger firmly against the side of your eye. But the light wasn’t random patterns. Ezr had worked long and hard with Pham’s exercises. Now the yellow light revealed the curving walls of the balloon membranes and the outer hull. Sometimes the view was distorted. Sometimes the perspective was from beneath his feet or behind his head. But with the right commands, and lots of concentration, he could see where no unaided person could.Pham can still see better. There had been hints, over the years. Nuwen used the localizers like a private empire.

Pham Nuwen was up ahead, standing behind a wall brace, invisible but for the fact that there were localizers beyond him, looking back. As Ezr closed the last few meters’ distance between them, his vision wavered as the other swung his tiny servants into a different constellation.

“Okay, make it quick.” Pham had stepped out to face him. The yellow pseudo-light painted his face haggard and drawn. He hadn’t dropped the Trinli persona? No, this looked like the hangover Pham had shown in the parlor, but there was something deeper to it.

“You—You promised me two thousand seconds.”

“Yeah, but things have changed. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“I’ve noticed a lot of things. I think it’s time we finally really talked about them. Nau, he truly admires you… you know that, don’t you?”

“Nau is full of lies.”

“True. But the stories he showed me, some large part of them is true. Pham, you and I have worked together through several Watches now. I’ve thought about things my aunt and my grand-uncles used to say about you. I’m past the hero worship. Finally, I realize how much you must… love… Focus. You’ve made me many promises, but they’ve always been so carefully framed. You want to beat Nau and take back what we lost—but more than anything, you want Focus, don’t you?

The silence stretched out for five seconds.To the direct question, whathe will he say? When he finally spoke, his voice was grating: “Focus is the key to making a civilization that lasts—across all of Human Space.”

“Focus is slavery, Pham.” Ezr spoke the words softly. “Of course, you know that; and in your heart I think you hate it. Zamle Eng—you made him your inner cover story; I think that was your heart crying out to you.”

Pham was silent for a second, glaring at him. His mouth twisted. “You’re a fool, Ezr Vinh. You read Nau’s stories and you still don’t understand. I was betrayed once before by a Vinh. It won’t happen again. Do you think I’ll let you live if you cross me?”

Pham glided closer. Ezr’s vision was abruptly snuffed out; he was cut off from all localizer input. Ezr raised his hands, palms up. “I don’t know. But I am a Vinh, Sura’s direct descendant, and also yours. We are a Family of secrets within secrets; someday I would have been told the truth about Brisgo Gap. But even as a child, I heard little things, hints. The Family has not forgotten you. There’s even a motto that we never say on the outside: ‘We owe all to Pham Nuwen; be thou kind unto him.’ So even if you kill me, I have to talk to you.” Ezr stared into the silent dark; he didn’t even know where the other was standing now. “And after yesterday… I think you will listen. I think I have nothing to fear.”

“Afteryesterday ?” Pham’s voice was angry and near. “My little Vinh snake, what can you possibly know about yesterday?”

Ezr stared out in the direction of the voice. There was something about Pham’s voice, a hatred that went beyond reason.What did happen withReynolt? Things were going terribly wrong, but all he had were the words already planned: “You didn’t kill her. I believe what Trud said. Killing her would have been easy, and could have looked just as much like an accident. And so I think I know about where Nau’s stories are true and where they are lies.” Ezr reached out with both arms, and his hands fell on Pham’s shoulders. He stared intently into the dark, willing vision. “Pham! All your life you have been driven. That, and your genius, made us what we are. But you wanted more. Quite what, is never clear in the Qeng Ho histories, but I could see it in Nau’s records. You had a wonderful dream, Pham. Focus might give it to you… but the price is too high.”

There was a moment of silence, then a sound, almost like an animal in pain. Abruptly, Ezr’s arms were struck aside. Two hands grabbed him at the throat, viselike and squeezing shut. All that was left was shocked surprise, dimming toward final blackout….

And then the hands relaxed their pressure. All around him glowbugs flashed stark white light, dozens of tiny popping sounds. He gasped, dazed, trying to understand. Pham was blowing the capacitors in all the nearby localizers! The pinpoint flashes showed Pham Nuwen in bright and black stop action. There was a glittering madness in his eyes that Ezr had never seen.

The lights were farther away now, the destruction spreading outward from them. Ezr’s voice came out a terrified croak: “Pham. Our cover. Without the localizers—”

The last of the tiny flashes showed a twisted smile on the other’s face. “Without the localizers, we die! Die, little Vinh. I no longer care.”

Ezr heard him turn and push off. What was left was darkness and silence—and death that must be no more than Ksecs away. For no matter how hard Ezr tried, he found no sign of localizer support.

What do you do when your dream dies? Pham floated alone in the dark of his room, and thought about the question with something like curiosity, almost indifference. At the edge of his consciousness, he was aware of the ragged hole he had punched in the localizer net. The net was robust. That disruption was not automatically revealed to the Emergent snoops. But without careful revision, news of the failure would eventually percolate out to them. He was vaguely aware that Ezr Vinh was desperately trying to cover the burnout. Surprisingly, the boy had not made things worse, but he had not a prayer of doing the high-level cover-up. A few hundred seconds, at most, and Kal Omo would alert Brughel… and the charade would be over. It really didn’t matter anymore.

What do you do when your dream dies?

Dreams die in every life. Everyone gets old. There is promise in the beginning when life seems so bright. The promise fades when the years get short.

Butnot Pham’s dream. He had pursued it across five hundred light-years and three thousand years of objective time. It was a dream of a single Humankind, where justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned, and where two-bit kings didn’t give children away as hostages. When Sammy had dug him out of the cemeterium at Lowcinder, Pham was dying, butnot the dream. The dream had been bright as ever in his mind, consuming him.

And here he hadfound the edge that could make the dream come true: Focus, an automation deep enough and smart enough to manage an inter-stellar civilization. It could create the “loving slaves” whose possibility Sura had made jest of. So what if it was slavery? There were far greater injustices that Focus would banish forever.

Maybe.

He had looked away from Egil Manrhi, now scarcely more than a scanning device. He had looked away from Trixia Bonsol and all the others, locked for years in their tiny cells. But yesterday, he’d been forced to look upon Anne Reynolt, standing alone against all the power of Focus, spending her life to resist that power. The particulars had been a great surprise to Pham, but he had been fooling himself to think that such was not part of the price for his dream. Anne was Cindi Ducanh writ large.

And today, Ezr Vinh and his little speech: “The price is too high!” EzrVinh !

Pham might have his dream… if he gave up the reason for it.

Once before, a Vinh had stepped between him and final success.Letthe Vinh snake die. Let them all die. Let me die.

Pham curled inward upon himself. He was suddenly conscious that he was weeping. Except as a deceit, he hadn’t cried since… he didn’t remember… perhaps since those days at the other end of his life when he first came aboard theReprise.

So what do you do when your dream dies?

When your dream dies, you give it up.

And then what is left? For a long time, Pham’s mind dwelled in a nothingness. And then once more, he became aware of the images flickering around him from the localizer net: down on the rockpile, the Focused slaves crammed by the hundreds in the honeycombs of Hammerfest, Anne Reynolt asleep in a cell as small as any.

They deserved better than what had happened to them. They deserved better than what Tomas Nau had planned for them. Anne deserved better.

He reached out into the net, and gently touched Ezr Vinh, motioned him aside. He gathered the boy’s efforts up and began building them out into an effective patch. There were details: the bruises on Vinh’s neck, the need for ten thousand new localizers in the temp interspace. He could handle them, and in the longer run—

Anne Reynolt would eventually recover from what he had done to her. When that happened, the game of cat-and-mouse would resume, but this time he must protect her and all the other slaves. It would be so much harder than before. But maybe with Ezr Vinh, if they worked as a real team… The plans formed and re-formed in Pham’s mind. It was a far cry from breaking the wheel of history, but there was a strange, rising pleasure in doing what felt wholly right.

And somewhere before he finally fell asleep, he remembered Gunnar Larson, the old man’s gentle mocking, the old man’s advice that Pham understand the limits of the natural world, and accept them.So maybe he wasright. Funny. All the years in this room he had lain awake, grinding his teeth, planning his plans and dreaming what he might do with Focus. Now that he had given it up, there were still plans, still terrible dangers… but for the first time in many years there was also… peace.

That night he dreamed of Sura. And there was no pain.