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
