A Deepness in the Sky (39 page)

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.