fleet committee and escape Canberra space. Sura Vinh planned for the long haul, saw problems where no one else could see. She avoided risks—or confronted them with overwhelming force of her own. In Pham’s confused moral pantheon, she was much less than Cindi… and much more.
Sura never bought his notion of a Qeng Ho star kingdom. But she didn’t simply deny him; she showered him with books, with economics and histories that had eluded his decade-long reading schedule. A reasonable person would have accepted her point; there had been so many “common sense” things that Pham Nuwen had been wrong about before. But Pham still had his old stubbornness. Maybe it was Sura who wore blinders. “We could build an interstellar net. It would just be… slow.”
Sura laughed. “Yeah! Slow. Like a three-way handshake would take a thousand years!”
“Well, obviously the protocols would be different. And the usage, too. But it could change the random trading function into something much more, ah, profitable.” He had almost saidpowerful, but he knew that would just get him zinged about his “medieval” mind-set. “We could keep a floating database of Customers.”
Sura shook her head, “But out of date by decades to millennia.”
“We could maintain human language standards. Our network programming standards would outlive any Customer government. Our trading culture could last forever.”
“But Qeng Ho is just one fish in a random sea of traders…. Oh.” Pham could see that he was finally getting through. “So the ‘culture’ of our broadcasts would give participants a trading edge. So there would be a reinforcement effect.”
“Yes, yes! And we could crypto-partition the broadcasts to protect against nearby competition.” Pham smiled slyly. The next point was something that little Pham, and probably Pham’s father the King of all Northland, could never have conceived. “In fact, we could even have some broadcasts in the clear. The language standards material, for instance, and the low end of our tech libraries. I’ve been reading the Customer histories. All the way back to Old Earth, the only constant is the churn, the rise of civilization, the fall, as often as not the local extinction of Humankind. Over time, Qeng Ho broadcasts could damp those swings.”
Sura was nodding, a far look settling into her eyes. “Yes. If we did it right, we’d end up with Customer cultures that spokeour language, were molded to our trading needs, and usedour programming environment—” Her gaze snapped up to his face. “You still have empire on the brain, don’t you?”
Pham just smiled.
Sura had a million objections, but she had caught the spirit of the idea, recast it into her experience, and now her entire imagination was working alongside his. As the days passed, her objections became more like suggestions, and their arguments more a kind of wondrous scheming.
“You’re crazy, Pham… but that doesn’t matter. Maybe it takes a crazy medievalist to be so ambitious. It’s like… it’s like we’re creating a civilization out of whole cloth. We can set up our own myths, our own conventions. We’ll be in at the ground floor of everything.”
“And we’ll outlast any competition.”
“Lord,” Sura said softly. (It would be some time before they invented the “Lord of All Trade” and the pantheon of lesser gods.) “And you know, Namqem is the ideal place to start. They’re about as advanced as a civilization can ever get, but they’re getting a little cynical and decadent. They have propaganda techs as good as any in human histories. What you’re suggesting is strange, but it’s trivial compared to ad campaigns on a planetary net. If my cousins are still in Namqem space, I bet they’d bankroll the operation.” She laughed, joyous and almost childlike, and Pham realized how badly the fear of bankruptcy and disgrace had bent her down. “Hell, we’re gonna turn aprofit !”
The rest of their Watch was a nonstop orgy of imagination and invention and lust. Pham came up with a combination of beamed and broadcast interstellar radio, schedules that could keep fleets and families in synch across centuries. Sura accepted most of the protocol design, wonder and obvious delight in her eyes. As for the human engineering, Pham’s scheme of hereditary lords and military fleets—Sura laughed at those, and Pham did not argue the judgment. After all, in people-things he was still scarcely more than a thirteen-year-old medieval.
In fact, Sura Vinh was far more awed than patronizing. Pham remembered their last conversation before he took his first turn in a coldsleep coffin. Sura had been calibrating the radiative coolers, checking the hypothermia drugs. “We’ll come out almost together, Pham, me a hundred Ksec before you. I’ll be here to help.” She smiled and he could feel her gaze gently searching in him. “Don’t worry.”
Pham made some flippant remark, but of course she saw the uneasiness in him. She spoke of other things as he slipped into the coffin, a running monologue of their plans and daydreams, what they would begin when they finally reached Namqem. And then it was time, and she hesitated. She leaned down and kissed him lightly on the lips. Her smile turned faintly teasing, but she was mocking herself as much as him: “Sleep well, sweet prince.”
And then she was gone, and the drugs were taking effect. It didn’t feel cold at all. His last thoughts were a strange floating back across his past. During Pham’s childhood on Canberra, his father had been a faraway figure. His own brothers had been lethal threats to his existence. Cindi, he had lost Cindi before he ever really understood. But for Sura Vinh… he had the feeling of a grown child for a loving parent, the feeling of a man for his woman, the feeling of a human being for a dear friend.
In some fundamental sense, Sura Vinh had been all those things. For much of her long life, Sura Vinh had seemed to be his friend. And even though she was ultimately his betrayer—still, there at the beginning, Sura Vinh had been a woman good and true.
Someone was shaking him gently, waving a hand in his face. “Hey, Trinli! Pham! Are you still with us?” It was Jau Xin, and he looked genuinely concerned.
“Ungh, yes, yes. I’m fine.”
“You sure?” Xin watched him for several seconds, then drifted back to his seat. “I had an uncle who went all glassy-eyed like you just did. Tas a stroke, and he—”
“Yeah, well I’m fine. Never better.” Pham put the bluster back in his voice. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”
The claim provoked diversionary laughter all round the table. “Thinking. A bad habit, Pham, old boy!” After a few moments, their concern faded. Pham listened attentively now, occasionally injecting loud opinions.
In fact, invasive daydreaming had been a feature of his personality since at least his leaving the Canberra. He’d get totally wrapped up in memories or planning, and lose himself the way some people did in immersion videos. He’d screwed up at least one deal because of it. From the corner of his eye, he could see that Qiwi was gone. Yes, the girl’s childhood had been much like his, and maybe that accounted for her imagination and drive now. In fact, he had often wondered if the Strentmannians’ crazy childrearing was based on stories of Pham’s time on theReprise. At least when he had reached his destination, things got better. Poor Qiwi had found only death and deception here. But she still kept going….
“We’re getting good translations now.” Trud Silipan was back on the Spiders. “I’m in charge of Reynolt’s translator zipheads.” Trud was more like an attendant than a manager, but no one pointed that out. “I tell you, any day now we’ll start getting information about what the Spiders’ original civilization was like.”
“I don’t know, Trud. Everyone says this must be a fallen colony. But if the Spiders are elsewhere in space, how come we don’t hear their radio?”
Pham: “Look. We’ve been over this before. Arachna must be a colony world. This system is just too hostile for life to start naturally.”
And someone else: “Maybe the creatures don’t have a Qeng Ho.” Chuckles went round the table.
“No, there’d still be plenty of radio noise. We’d hear them.”
“Maybe the rest of them are really far away, like the Perseus Mumbling—”
“Or maybe they’re so advanced they don’t use radio. We only noticed these guys because they’re starting over.” It was an old, old argument, part of a mystery that extended back to the Age of Failed Dreams. More than anything else it was what had drawn the human expeditions to Arachna. It was certainly what had drawn Pham.
And indeed, Pham had already found Something New, something so powerful that the origin of the Spiders was now a peripheral issue for him. Pham had found Focus. With Focus, the Emergents could convert their brightest people into dedicated machines of thought. A dud like Trud Silipan could get effective translations at the touch of a key. A monster like Tomas Nau could have eyes unresting. Focus gave the Emergents a power that no one had ever
