A Deepness in the Sky (59 page)

"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."