just after she departed. There was so much he wanted to tell her, so much to ask her and show her. Yet when the time finally came, he couldn’t bring himself to stay at the coldsleep hold and greet her.
She found him in an equipment bay on the aft hull, a tiny niche with a real window on the stars. It was a place that Pham had appropriated several years earlier.
There was tap on the light plastic cover. He slipped it aside.
“Hello, Pham.” Sura had a strange smile on her face.She looked strange. So young. In fact, she simply hadn’t aged. And now Pham Nuwen had lived twenty-four years. He waved her into the tiny room. She floated close past him, and turned. Her eyes were solemn above the smile. “You’ve grown up, friend.”
Pham started to shake his head. “Yes. But I—you are still ahead of me.”
“Maybe. In some ways. But you’re twice the programmer I will ever be. I saw the solutions you worked out for Ceng this last Watch.”
They sat, and she asked him about Ceng’s problems and his solutions. All the glib speeches and bravado he’d spent the last year planning were swept from his mind, his conversation reduced to awkward starts and stops. Sura didn’t seem to notice.Damn. How does a Qeng Ho man take a woman? On Canberra, he had grown up believing in chivalry and sacrifice… and had gradually learned that the true method was very different: a gentleman simply grabbed what he wanted, assuming a more powerful gentleman did not already own it. Pham’s own personal experience was limited and surely untypical: poor Cindi had grabbedhim. At the beginning of the last Watch, he had tried the true Canberra method on one of the female crew. Xina Rao had broken his wrist and made a formal complaint. It was something Sura would surely hear about sooner or later.
The thought blew away Pham’s tenuous hold on the conversation. He stared at Sura in embarrassed silence, then blurted out the announcement he had been holding secret for some special moment. “I… I’m going to go off- Watch, Sura. I’ll finally start coldsleep.”
She nodded solemnly, as if she had never guessed.
“You know what really did it for me, Sura? The dustmote that broke me? It was three years ago. You were off-Watch,” and I realized how longit would be until next I saw you. “I was trying to make that second-level celestial mech stuff work. You really have to understand some math to do that. For a while, I was stumped. For the hell of it, I moved up here, just started staring at the sky. I’ve done that before. Every year, my sun is dimmer; it’s scary.”
“I’ll bet,” said Sura, “but I didn’t know you could see directly aft, even from here.” She slid near the forty- centimeter port, and killed the lights.
“Yes you can,” said Pham, “at least when your eyes adjust.” The room was dark as pitch now. This was areal window, not some enhancing display device. He moved close behind her. “See, there’s the four bright stars of the Pikeman. Now Canberra’s star just makes his pole one tong longer.” Silly. She doesn’t know the Canberran sky. He babbled on, a mindless cover for what he was feeling. “But even that is not what got me; my sun is another star, so what? The thing is, the constellations: the Pikeman, the Wild Goose, the Plow. I can still recognize them, but even their shapes have changed. I know, I should have expected that. I’d been doing the math behind much harder things. But… it struck me. In eleven years, we have moved so far that the whole sky has changed. It gave me a gut feeling of how far we’ve come, how very far we still have to go.”
He gestured in the dark, and his palm slapped lightly on the smooth swell of her rear. His voice died in a little squeak, and for a measurable instant his hand sat motionless on her pants, his fingers touching her bare flesh just above the hip line. Somehow he hadn’t noticed before; her blouse wasn’t even tucked in. His hand swept around her waist and upward across the smooth curve of her belly, kept moving till he touched the undersides of her breasts. The move was a grab, modified and tentative perhaps, but a definite grab.
Sura’s reaction was almost as swift as Xina Rao’s had been. She twisted beneath him, her breast centering in the palm of his other hand. Before Pham could get out of her way, her arm was behind his neck, levering him down… for a long, hard kiss. He felt multiple shocks where his lips touched hers, where his hand rested, where her leg slid up between his.
And now she was pulling his shirt from his pants, forcing their bodies into a single long touch. She leaned her head back from his lips and laughed softly. “Lord! I’ve been wanting to get my hands on you ever since you were fifteen years old.”
But why didn’t you? I was in your power.It was the last coherent thought he had for some time. In the dark, there loomed more wonderful questions. How to get leverage, how to join the smooth endpoints of softness and hard. They bounced randomly from wall to wall, and poor Pham might never have found his way if not for his partner and guide.
Afterward she brought up the lights, and showed him how to do it in his sleeping hammock. And then again, with the lights out once more. After a long while, they floated exhausted in the dark. Peace and joy, and his arms were so full with her. Starlight was a magical faintness, that after enough time seemed almost bright. Bright enough to glint on Sura’s eyes, to show the white of her teeth. She was smiling. “You’re right about the stars,” she said. “It is a bit humbling to see the sweep of the stars, to know how little we count.”
Pham squeezed her gently, but was for the moment so satisfied he could actually think about what she said. “…Yes, it’s scary. But at the same time, I look out and realize that with starships and coldsleep, we are outside and beyond them. We can make what we want of the universe.”
The white of Sura’s smile broadened. “Ah, Pham, maybe you haven’t changed. I remember the first days of little Pham, when you could barely spit out an intelligible sentence. You kept insisting the Qeng Ho was an empire, and I kept saying we were simply traders, could never be anything more.”
“I remember, but still I don’t understand. Qeng Ho has been around for how long?”
“That name for ‘trading fleet’? Maybe two thousand years.”
“That’s longer than most empires.”
“Sure, and part of the reason is, we’re not an empire. It’s our function that makes us seem everlasting. The Qeng Ho of two thousand years ago had a different language, had no common culture with now. I’m sure that things like it exist off and on through all Human Space. It’s a process, not a government.”
“Just a bunch of guys who happen to be doing similar things?”
“You got it.”
Pham was silent for a while. She just didn’t understand. “Okay. That is the way things are now. But don’t you see the power that this gives you? You hold a high technology across hundreds of light-years of space and thousands of years of time.”
“No. That’s like saying the sea surf could rule a world: it’s everywhere, it’s powerful, and it seems to be coordinated.”
“You could have a network, like the fleet network you used at Canberra.”
“Lightspeed, Pham, remember? Nothing goes faster. I’ve no idea what traders are doing on the other side of Human Space—and at best that information would be centuries out of date. The most you’ve seen is networking across theReprise; you’ve studied how a small fleet network is run. I doubt you can imagine the sort of net it takes to support a planetary civilization. You’ll see at Namqem. Every time we visit a place like that, we lose some crew. Life with a planetary network, where you can interact with millions of people with millisecond latencies—that is something you are still blind to. I’ll bet when we get to Namqem, you’ll leave, too.”
“I’ll never—”
But Sura was turning in his embrace, her breasts sliding across his chest, her hand sweeping down his belly, reaching. Pham’s denial was lost in his body’s electric response.
After that, Pham moved into Sura’s cruise quarters. They spent so much time together that the other Watch standers teased him for “kidnapping our captain.” In fact, the time with Sura Vinh was unending joy to Pham, but it was not just lust fulfilled. They talked and talked and argued and argued… and set the course of the rest of their lives.
And sometimes he thought of Cindi. Both she and Sura had come after him, lifting him to new awareness. They had both taught him things, argued with him, and bedeviled him. But they were as different as summer from winter, as different as a pond from an ocean. Cindi had stood up for him at the risk of her life, stood alone against all the King’s men. In his wildest dreams, Pham could not imagine Sura Vinh committing her life against such odds. No, Sura was infinitely thoughtful and cautious. It was she who had analyzed the risks of remaining at Canberra, and concluded that success was unlikely—and persuaded enough others about those risks to wangle a ship from the
