distant force of nature, capricious behind ranks of tutors and contesting heirs and courtiers. His lips were drawn down in a thin line. For an instant something like sympathy might have lived in the hard eyes. He touched the side of Pham’s face. “Be strong, boy. You bear my name.”
Tran turned, spoke pidgin words to the star man. And Pham was in alien hands.
Like Qiwi Lin Lisolet, Pham Nuwen had been cast out into the great darkness. And like Qiwi, Pham did not belong.
He remembered those first years more clearly than any other time in his life. No doubt the crew intended to pop him into cold storage and dump him at the next stop. What can you make of a kid who thinks there’s one world and it’s flat, who has spent his whole life learning to whack about with a sword?
Pham Nuwen had had his own agenda. The coldsleep coffins scared the devil out of him. TheReprise had scarcely left Canberra orbit when little Pham disappeared from his appointed cabin. He had always been small for his age, and by now he understood about remote surveillance. He kept the crew of theReprise busy for more than four days searching for him. In the end, of course, Pham lost—and some very angry Qeng Ho dragged him before the ship’s master.
By now he knew that was the “handmaiden” he had seen in the fen. Even knowing, it was still hard to believe. One weak woman, commanding a starship and a crew of a thousand (though soon almost all of those were off-Watch, in coldsleep). Hmm. Maybe she had been the owner’s concubine, but had poisoned him and now ruled in his place. That was a credible scenario, but it made her an exceptionally dangerous person. In fact, Sura had been a junior captain, the leader of the faction that voted against staying at Canberra. Those who stayed called them “the cautious cowards.” And now they were heading home, into certain bankruptcy.
Pham remembered the look on her face when they finally caught him and brought him to the bridge. She had scowled down at the little prince, a boy still dressed in the velvet of Canberran nobility.
“You’ve delayed the start of the Watches, young fellow.”
The language was barely intelligible to Pham. The boy pushed down the panic and the loneliness and glared right back at her. “Madam. I am your hostage, not your slave, not your victim.”
“Damn, what did he say?” Sura Vinh looked around at her lieutenants. “Look, son. It’s a sixty-year flight. We’ve got to put you away.”
That last comment got through the language barrier, but it sounded too much like what the stable boss said when he was going to behead a horse. “No!You’ll not put me in a coffin.”
And Sura Vinh understood that, too.
One of the others spoke abruptly to Shipmaster Vinh. Probably something like “It doesn’t matter what he wants, ma’am.”
Pham tensed himself for another futile wrestling match. But Sura just stared at him for a second and then ordered everyone else out of her office. The two of them talked pidgin for some Ksecs. Pham knew court intrigue and strategy, and none of it seemed to apply here. Before they were done, the little boy was crying inconsolably and Sura had her arm across his shoulders. “It will be years,” she said. “You understand that?”
“…Y-yes.”
“You’ll arrive an old man if you don’t let us put you in coldsleep.” That last was still an unfortunate word.
“No, no, no!I’ll die first.” Pham Nuwen was beyond logic.
Sura was silent for a moment. Years later, she told Phamher side of the encounter: “Yeah, I could have heaved you in the freezer. It would have been prudent and ethical—and it would have saved me a world of problems. I will never understand why Deng’s fleet committee forced me to accept you; they were petty and pissed, but this was too much.
“So there you were, a little kid sold out by his own father. I’d be damned if I’d treat you the way he and the committee did. Besides, if you spent the flight on ice, you’d still be a zero when we got to Namqem, helpless in a tech civilization. So why not let you stay out of coldsleep and try to teach you the basics? I figured you’d see how long the years looked in a ship between the stars. In a few years, the coldsleep coffins might not seem quite so terrible to you.”
It hadn’t been simple. Ship security had to be reprogrammed for the presence of an irresponsible human. No uncrewed Tween Watches could be allowed. But the programming was done, and several of the Watch standers volunteered to extend their time out of coldsleep.
TheReprise reached ramcruise, 0.3 lightspeed, and sailed endlessly across the depths.
And Pham Nuwen had all the time in the universe. Several crewfolk—Sura for the first few Watches—did their best to tutor him. At first, he would have none of it… but the time stretched long. He learned to speak Sura’s language. He learned generalities about Qeng Ho.
“We trade between the stars,” said Sura. The two were sitting alone on the ramscoop’s bridge. The windows showed a symbolic map of the five star systems that the Qeng Ho circuited.
“Qeng Ho is an empire,” the boy said, looking out at the stars and trying to imagine how those territories compared with his father’s kingdom.
Sura laughed. “No, not an empire. No government can maintain itself across light-years. Hell, most governments don’t last more than a few centuries. Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.”
Little Pham Nuwen frowned. Even now, Sura’s words were sometimes nonsense. “No. It has to be an empire.”
Sura didn’t argue. A few days later, she went off-Watch, dead in one of the strange, cold coffins. Pham almost begged her not to kill herself, and for Msecs afterward he grieved on wounds he hadn’t imagined before. Now there were other strangers, and unending days of silence. Eventually he learned to read Nese.
And two years later, Sura returned from the dead. The boy still refused to go off-Watch, but from that point on he welcomed everything they wanted to teach him. He knew there was power beyond any Canberran lordship here, and now he understood that he might be master of it. In two years, he made up for what a child of civilization might learn in five. He had a competency in math; he could use the top- and second-level Qeng Ho program interfaces.
Sura looked almost the same as before her coldsleep, except that in some strange way, she seemed younger now. One day he caught her staring at him.
“So what’s the problem?” Pham asked.
Sura grinned. “I never saw a kid on a long flight. You’re what now, fifteen Canberra years old? Bret tells me you’ve learned a lot.”
“Yes. I’m going to be Qeng Ho.”
“Hmm.” She smiled, but it was not the patronizing, sympathy-filled smile that Pham remembered. She was truly pleased, and she didn’t disbelieve his claim. “You’ve got an awful lot to learn.”
“I’ve got an awful lot of time to do it.”
Sura Vinh stayed on Watch four straight years that time. Bret Trinli stayed for the first of those years, extending his own Watch. The three of them trekked through every accessible cubic meter of theReprise: the sick- bay and coffins, the control deck, the fuel tanks. TheReprise had burned almost two million tonnes of hydrogen to reach ramcruise speeds. In effect, she was a vast, nearly empty hulk now. “And without lots of support at the destination, this ship will never fly again.”
“You could refuel, even if there were only gas giants at the destination. Even I could manage the programs for that.”
“Yeah, and that’s what we did at Canberra. But without an overhaul, we can’t go far and we can’t do zip once we get there.” Sura paused, cursed under her breath. “Those damn fools. Why did they stay behind?” Sura seemed caught between her contempt for the shipmasters who had stayed to conquer Canberra, and her own guilt at having deserted them.
Bret Trinli broke the silence. “Don’t feel so bad for them. They’re taking a big chance, but if they win, they’ll have the Customers we were all expecting there.”
“I know—and we’re guaranteed to arrive at Namqem with nothing. Bet we’ll lose theReprise. “ She shook herself, visibly pushing back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. “Okay, in the meantime we’re going to create one more trained crewmember.” She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. “What specialty do we need the most, Bret?”
