your feet.”
Pham felt a shock of surprise. He had thought those werevines. He followed the slender limbs back to the water… yes, there were four eye stalks, four unblinking eyes. They glittered yellow in the waning light of Trygve’s sky arch. “Fred has lived a long time. Archeologists have found his breeding documents, a little experiment with native wildlife just before the Fall. He was some rich man’s pet, about as smart as a hund. But Fred is very old. He lived through the Fall. He was something of a legend in these parts. You are right, Fleet Captain; if you live long enough you see much. In the Middle Ages, Dirby was first a ruin, then the beginning of a great kingdom—its lords mined the secrets of the earlier age, to their own great profit. For a time, this hillside was the senate of those rulers. During the Renaissance, this was a slum and the lake at the bottom of the hill an open sewer. Even the name ‘Huskestrade’—the epitome of high-class modern Dirby addresses—, once meant something like ‘Street of the Outhouses.’
“But Fred survived it all. He was the legend of the sewers, his existence disbelieved by sensible folk until three centuries ago. Now he lives with full honor—in the cleanest water.” There was fondness in the old man’s voice. “So Fred has lived long, and he’s seen much. He’s still intellectually alive, as much as aluksterfiske can be. Witness his beady eyes upon us. But Fred knows far less of the world and his own history than I do from reading history.”
“Not a valid analogy. Fred is a dumb animal.”
“True. You are a bright human and you fly between the stars. You live a few hundred years, but those years are spread across a span as great as Fred’s. What more do you really see? Civilizations rise and fall, but all technical civilizations know the greatest secrets now. They know which social mechanisms normally work, and which ones quickly fail. They know the means to postpone disaster and evade the most foolish catastrophes. They know that even so, each civilization must inevitably fall. The electronics that you want from me may not exist anywhere else in Human Space—but I’m sure that equipment that good has been invented by humans before, and will be again. Similarly for the medical technology you correctly assume we want from you. Humankind as a whole is in a steady state, even if our domain is slowly expanding. Yes, compared to you I am like a bug in the forest, alive for one day. But I see as much as you; I live as much as you. I can study my histories and the radio accounts that float between the stars. I can see all the variety of triumph and barbarism that you Qeng Ho do.”
“We gather the best. With us it never dies.”
“I wonder. There was another trading fleet that came to Trygve Ytre when I was a young man. They were totally unlike you. Different language, different culture. Interstellar traders are simply a niche, not a culture.” Sura argued that, too. Here, in this ancient garden, the quiet words seemed to weigh more heavily than when Sura Vinh spoke them; Gunnar Larson’s voice was almost hypnotic. “Those earlier traders did not have your airs, Fleet Captain. They hoped to make their fortune, to ultimately go somewhere else and set up a planetary civilization.”
“Then they would no longer be Traders.”
“True; perhaps they would be something more. You’ve been in many planetary systems. Your manifest says you’ve spent a number of years at Namqem, long enough to appreciate a planetary civilization. We have hundreds of millions of people living within a few light-seconds of each other. The local net that spans Trygve Ytre gives almost every citizen a view on Human Space that you can only have when you come to port…. More than anything, your trading life between the stars is a Ruritania of the Mind.”
Pham didn’t recognize the reference, but he got the other’s point. “Magnate Larson, I wonder that you want to live long. You have everything figured out—a universe free of progress, where all things die and no good is accumulated.” Pham’s words were partly sarcasm, partly honest puzzlement. Gunnar Larson had opened windows, and the view was bleak.
Barely audible, a sigh. “You don’t read very much, do you, son?” Strange. Pham did not think the other was probing anymore. There was something like sad amusement in the question.
“I read enough.” Sura herself complained that Pham spent too much time with manuals. But Pham had started late, and had spent his whole life trying to catch up. So what if his education was a little skewed?
“You ask me the real point of it all. Each of us must take his own path on that, Fleet Captain. Different paths have their own advantages, their own perils. But for your own, human, sake… you should consider: Each civilization has its time. Each science has its limits. And each of us must die, living less than half a thousand years. If you truly understand those limits… then you are ready to grow up, to know what counts.” He was silent for a while. “Yes… just listen to the peace. It’s a gift to be able to do that. Too much time is spent in frenzied rushing. Listen to the breeze in thelestras. Watch Fred try to figure us out. Listen to the laughter of your children and your grandchildren. Enjoy the time you have, however it is given to you, and for however long.”
Larson leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be staring out at the starless darkness that was the center of Trygve’s disk. The arch of light from the eclipsed sun was dim and uniform all around the disk. The lightning had long since vanished; Pham guessed that seeing it was some function of viewing angle and the orientation of Trygve’s thunderheads. “An example, Fleet Captain. Sit and feel and see: sometimes, at mid-eclipse, there is an especial beauty. Watch the middle of Trygve’s disk.” Seconds passed. Pham stared upward. Trygve’s lower latitudes were normally so dark… but now: There was faint red, first so dim that Pham thought it might just be a figment of suggestibility. The light brightened slowly, a deep, deep red, like sword steel still too cold for the hammer. There were bands of dark crossing it.
“The light is from the depths of Trygve itself. You know we get some direct warming from the planet. Sometimes, when the cloud canyons are oriented just right and the upper storms are gone, we have a very deep view—and we can see its glow with the naked eye.” The light came a little brighter. Pham glanced around the garden. Everything was in shades of red, but he could see more now than he had glimpsed in the lightning. The tall, stranded trees above the pond—they were part of the waterfall, guiding the water in extra swirls and pools. Clouds of flying things moved between the tree branches, and for a few moments they sang. Fred had climbed all the way out of the pond. He sat on multiple leg paddles and his shorter tentacles twitched upward, toward the light in the sky.
They watched in silence. Pham had observed Trygve with multispec on the way in from the asteroids. He wasn’t seeing anything now that was news to him. The whole show was just a happenstance of geometry and timing. And yet… being tied to a single place, on a course that was determined beyond human control, he could see how Customers might be impressed when the universe chose to reveal something. It was ridiculous, but he could feel some of the awe himself.
And then Trygve’s heart was dark again and the singing in the trees died away; the whole show had lasted less than one hundred seconds.
It was Larson who broke the silence. “I’m sure we can do business, my young-old man. In a measure I shouldn’t reveal, we do want your medical technology. But still, I would be grateful for your answer to my original question. What will you do with the Larson localizers? Among the unsuspecting, they are an espionage miracle. Abused, they lead to ubiquitous law enforcement, and a quick end to civilization. Who will you sell them to?”
For some reason, Pham answered him frankly. As the eastern limb of Trygve slowly brightened, Pham explained his vision of empire, the empire of all Humankind. It was something that he had never told a mere Customer. It was something he told only certain Qeng Ho, the ones who seemed the brightest and the most flexible. Even then, most could not accept the whole plan. Most were like Sura, rejecting Pham’s real goal, but more than willing to profit from a genuine Qeng Ho culture…. “So, we may keep the localizers to ourselves. It will cost us trade, but there is anedge we need over the Customer civilizations. The common language, the synchronized voyage plans, our public databases—all those things will give our Qeng Ho a cohesive culture. But tricks like these localizers will take us a step beyond that. In the end, we will not be random occupiers of the ‘trading niche’; we will be the surviving culture of Humankind.”
Larson was silent for a long moment. “It’s a marvelous dream you have, son,” Larson said. The obscure amusement was gone from his voice. “A League of Humankind, breaking the wheel of time. I’m sorry, I cannot believe we’ll ever reach the summit of your dream. But the foothills, the lower slopes of it… those are something marvelous, and perhaps attainable. The bright times could be brighter and they could last longer….”
Larson was an extraordinary person, customer or no. But for whatever reason, he had the same blinders as Sura Vinh. Pham slumped back onto the soft wooden bench. After a moment, Larson continued. “You’re disappointed. You respected me enough to hope for more. You see rightly about many things, Fleet Captain. You see marvelously clear for someone from… Ruritania.” His voice seemed to smile gently. “You know, my family’s
