They walked northward, around the hillock. Even if this were the hill where Sherkaner left Thract, they were well away from where Rachner could have landed. Still, Victory peeped into every shadow.
Trixia couldn’t keep up. She straightened and looked away from the hillside. The sky above the southern horizon glowed, as if over a city. And it almost was. The old missile fields were gone, but now the world had a better use for the altiplano. Cavorite mines. Companies from all over the waking world had descended on it. From orbit, you could see the open pit mines stretching from the original Kindred operation, a thousand miles across the wasteland. A million Spiders worked there now. Even if they never figured out how to synthesize the magic substance, cavorite would revolutionize local spaceflight, partly making up for the lack of other bodies in this solar system.
Victory seemed to notice that Trixia’s pace had faltered. The Spider found a rounded knob of rock, shaded from the wind, and settled on it. Trixia sat down beside her, pleased that they could be on the same level. Across the plains to the south, they could see hundreds of hillocks, any one of which might mark Sherkaner’s final rest. But in the sky glow beyond the horizon, tiny dots of light drifted slowly upward, antigrav freighters hauling mass into space. In all human histories, antigravity had been one of the Failed Dreams. And here it was.
Viki didn’t speak for a time. A human who didn’t know the Spiders might think she was asleep. But Trixia could see the telltale movements of eating hands, and she heard untranslated keening. Every so often Viki would be like this; every so often she had to shed the image that she projected to her team and Belga Underville and the aliens from space. Little Victory had done very well, at least as well as her mother could have done, Trixia was sure. She had managed the final triumph of her parents’ Great Lurk. In her own huds, Trixia could see a dozen calls pending for Major Lighthill. An hour or two alone, that was all Victory could spare these days. Outside of Brent, Trixia was probably the only person who knew the doubts that lived inside Victory Lighthill.
OnOff climbed into the sky, turning the shadows across the tumbled lands. This was the warmest High Equatoria would be for the next two hundred years, yet the best that OnOff could do was raise a soft haze of sublimation.
“I hope for the best, Trixia. The General and Dad, they were so very clever. They can’t both be dead. But they—and I—had to do so many hard things. People who trusted us died.”
“It was a war, Victory. Against Pedure, against the Emergents.” That was what Trixia told herself now, when she thought about Xopi Reung.
“Yeah. And the ones who survived are doing well. Even Rachner Thract. He’s never coming back to the King’s Service. He feels betrayed. Hewas betrayed. But he’s up there with Jirlib and Didi now”—she jerked a hand in the direction of L1—“becoming a kind of Spiderish Qeng Ho.” She was quiet, then abruptly slapped at the rock of her perch. Trixia could hear that her real voice was angry, defensive. “Damn it, Mother was a good general! I could never have done what she did; there’s too much of Daddy in me. And in the early years it worked; his genius and hers multiplied together. But it got harder and harder to disguise the counterlurk. Videomancy was a great cover, it let us have independent hardware and a covert data stream right under the humans’ snouts. But if there were evenone slip, if the humans ever guessed, they could kill us all. That corroded Mom’s heart.”
Her eating hands fluttered aimlessly and there was a choked hissing sound. Victory was weeping. “I just hope she told Hrunkner. He was the most loyal friend we ever had. He loved us even though he thought we were a perversion. But Mother just could not accept that. She wanted too much from Uncle Hrunk, and when he couldn’t change she—”
Trixia slid her arm across the other’s midback. It was the closest a human could come to giving a multi-arm hug.
“You know how much Daddy wanted to tell Hrunk about the counterlurk. That last time in Princeton, Daddy and I thought we could manage it, that Mother would go along. But no. The General was so… unforgiving. In the end… well, she wanted Hrunk along on her trip to Southmost. If she trusted him with that, surely she would tell him the rest. Wouldn’t she? She’d tell him that it was not all in vain.”
EPILOGUE
SEVEN YEARS LATER—
The Spiders’ world had a moon; the L1 rockpile had been coaxed into a synchronous orbit on Princeton’s longitude. By the standards of most habitable worlds, it was a pitiful moon, barely visible from the ground. Forty thousand kilometers out, the lump of diamonds and ice glinted dimly in the light of the stars and the sun. Yet it reminded half the world that the universe was not what they had thought.
Fore and aft of the rockpile stretched a string of tiny stars, beads that grew brighter year by year: the Spiders’ temps and factories. In the early years, they were the most primitive structures ever to fly in space, cheap and overbuilt and overcrewed, hoisted on cavorite wings. But the Spiders learned fast and well….
There had been state dinners in the Arachnan Grand Temp before. The King himself had ascended to orbit for the departure of the fleet to Triland. That had been four starships, refurbished by the new capital industries of his empire and the entire world. And that fleet had carried not just Qeng Ho and Trilanders and former Emergents. Two hundred Spiders had been aboard, led by Jirlib Lighthill and Rachner Thract. They carried first implementations of the improved ramdrives and coldsleep equipment. More important, they carried the keys for the encrypted knowledge beamed earlier across the light-years to Triland and Canberra.
For that departure, nearly ten thousand Spiders had come into space, the King on one of the first all- Arachnan ferries, and that “dinner” had stretched across more than 300Ksec. Since that time, there had been more Spiders in near Arachna space than humans.
To Pham Nuwen, that was only fitting. Customer civilizations should dominate the territory around their planets. Hell, to the Qeng Ho, it was the locals’ most important function—to be havens where ships could be rebuilt and refurnished, to be the markets that made trekking across interstellar distances a profitable thing.
For this second departure, the Grand Temp was almost as crowded as at the Triland Farewell, but the actual dinner was much smaller, ten or fifteen people. Pham knew that Ezr and Qiwi and Trixia and Viki had engineered this affair to be small enough that people could talk and be heard. This might be the last time so many of the surviving players might ever see each other in one place.
The ballroom of the Arachnan Grand Temp was something new in the universe. The Spiders had been in space only 200Msec now, scarcely seven of their years. The ballroom was their first attempt at grandeur in free fall. They weren’t up to the bioengineering of Qeng Ho parks. In fact, most Spiders hadn’t yet realized that for starfarers, a living park is the greatest symbol of power and ability in space. Instead, the King’s designers had borrowed from Qeng Ho inorganic construction and tried to adapt their own architectural traditions to free fall. Doubtless, within another century they would regard the effort as laughable. Or maybe the mistakes would become part of tradition:
The outer wall was a tesselation of hundreds of transparent plates, held in a grid of titanium. Some were diamond, some were quartz, some were almost opaque to Pham’s eyes. The Spiders still preferred direct views. Video wallpaper and human display technologies didn’t come close to matching the range of their vision. The polyhedral surface swept outward to form a bubble fifty meters across. At its base the Spider designers had built a terraced mound, rising to the dining tables at the top. The slope was gentle by Arachna standards, with broad sweeping stairs. To human eyes, the mound was a cliff-walled pinnacle and the stairs were strange, broad ladders. But the overall effect was—for humans or Spiders—that wherever you were sitting around the dining table, you could look out on half the sky. The Grand Temp was a long structure, tidally stabilized, and the ballroom was on the Arachna-facing end. To someone looking straight up, the Spiders’ world filled much of the view. To someone looking off to the side, the rockpile and human temps were an orderly jumble, every year longer than before. In the other direction, you could see the Royal Shipyards. At this distance, the Yards were an undistinguished cluster of lights, flickering now and then with tiny flashes. The Spiders were building the tools to build the tools. In another year or
