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.”
