lineage is two thousand years deep. That’s a blink of the Trader’s eye—but only because Traders spend most of their time in sleep. And beyond the wisdom we have gathered directly, I and those before me have read of other places and times, a hundred worlds, a thousand civilizations. There are things about your ideas that could work. There are things about your ideas that are more plausibly hopeful than anything since the Age of Failed Dreams. I think I have insights that could be helpful….”
They talked through the rest of the eclipse, as the eastern limb of Trygve brightened, and the sun’s disk formed out of the planet’s depths and climbed toward open sky. The sky brightened into blue. And still they talked. Now it was Gunnar Larson who had the most to say. He was trying to be clear, and Pham was recording what the old man said. But maybe Aminese was not such a perfect mutual language as he thought; there was a lot of it that Pham never understood.
Along the way, they hit a deal for Pham’s entire medical manifest, and for the Larson localizers. There were other items—a breeding sample of the mid-eclipse song creatures—but overall the trading was very easy. There was so much benefit going in both directions… and Pham was overwhelmed by the other things that Gunnar Larson had to say, the advice that might be worthless but that had the stench of wisdom.
Pham’s voyage to Trygve Ytre was one of the more profitable of his trading career, but it was that dark-red conversation with the Ytreisch mystic that stuck the deepest in Pham Nuwen’s memory. Afterward, he was certain Larson had used some kind of psychoactive drugs on him; Pham could never have been so suggestible otherwise. But… maybe it didn’t matter. Gunnar Larson had had good ideas—the ones Pham could understand, anyway. That garden and the sense of peace that surrounded it—those were powerful, impressive things. Coming back from Trygve Ytre, Pham understood the peace that came from a living garden, and he understood the power of the mereappearance of wisdom. The two insights could be combined. Biologicals had always been a critical trade item… but now they would be more. The new Qeng Ho would have an ethic of living things at its heart. Every vehicle that could support a park should have one. The Qeng Ho would gather the best of living things as fanatically as they did the best of technology. That part of the old man’s advice had been very clear. Qeng Ho would have a reputation for understanding living things, for a timeless attachment to nature.
Thus were the park and bonsai traditions born. The parks were a major overhead, but in the millennia since Trygve Ytre, they had become the deepest and most loved of all the Qeng Ho traditions.
And Trygve Ytre and Gunnar Larson? Larson was millennia dead, of course. The civilization at Ytre had barely outlived the man. There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror. Most likely, Larson’s own localizers had precipitated the end. All the wisdom, all the inscrutability, hadn’t helped his world much.
Pham shifted in his sleep hammock. Thinking about Ytre and Larson always left him uneasy. It was wasted time… except tonight. Tonight he needed the mood of the time after that meeting. He needed something of the kinesthetic memory of dealing with the localizers. There must be dozens in this room by now. What was the pattern of motion and body state that would trigger them to talk back to him? Pham pulled the hammock wrap fully over his hands. Inside, his fingers played at a phantom keyboard. Surely that was too obvious. Until he had rapport, nothing like keystrokes should have an effect. Pham sighed, changed breathing and pulse yet again… and recaptured the awe of his first practice sessions with the Larson localizers.
A pale blue light, bluer than blue, blinked once near the edge of his vision. Pham opened his eyes a slit. The room was midnight dark. The light from the sleep panel was too faint to reveal colors. Nothing moved except the slow drifting of his hammock in the ventilator’s breeze. The blue light had been from elsewhere. From inside his optic nerve. Pham closed his eyes, repeated the breathing exercise. The blue, blinking light appeared once more. It was the effect of a localizer array’s synthesized beam, guiding off the two he had set by his temple and in his ear. As communication went, it was very crude, no more impressive than the random sparkles that most people ignore all the time. The system was programmed to be very cautious about revealing itself. This time he kept his eyes closed, and didn’t change the level of his breath or the calmness of his pulse. He curled two fingers toward his palm. A second passed. The light blinked again, responding. Pham coughed, waited, moved his right arm just so. The blue light blinked: One, Two, Three… it was a pulse train, counting binary for him. He echoed back to it, using the codes that he had set up long ago.
He was past the challenge/response module.He was in! The lights that flickered behind his eyes were almost random stimuli. It would take Ksecs to train the localizer net to the precision that this sort of display could have. The optic nerve was simply too large, too complex for instantly clear video. No matter. The net was reliably talking to him now. The old customizations were coming out of hiding. The localizers had established his physical parameters; he could talk to them in any number of ways from now on. He had almost 3Msec remaining in his current Watch. That should be time enough to do the absolutely necessary, to invade the fleet net and establish a new cover story. What would it be? Something shameful, yes. Some shameful reason for “Pham Trinli” to play the buffoon all these years. A story that Nau and Brughel could relate to and think to use as a lever against him. What?
Pham felt a smile steal across his face.Zamle Eng, may your slave-trading soul rot in Hell. You caused me so much grief. Maybe you can dome some posthumous good.
TWENTY-THREE
“The Children’s Hour of Science.” What an innocent name. Ezr returned from his long off-Watch to find that it had become his personal nightmare.Qiwi promised; how could she let this happen? But every live show was more of a circus than the last.
And today’s might be the worst yet. With good luck it might also be the last.
Ezr drifted into Benny’s about a thousand seconds before show time. Till the last moment, he’d intended to watch it from his room, but masochism had won another round. He settled into the crowd and listened silently to the chatter.
Benny’s booze parlor had become the central institution of their existence at L1. The parlor was sixteen years old now. Benny himself was on a twenty-five-percent duty cycle; he and his father shared the running of the place with Gonle Fong and others. The old wallpaper had blistered in places, and in some places the illusion of three-dimensional view was lost. Everything here was unofficial, either appropriated from other sites in the L1 cloud, or made from diamonds and ice and airsnow. Ali Lin had even come up with a fungal matrix that allowed the growing of incredible wood, complete with grain and something like growth rings. Sometime during Ezr’s long absence, the bar and the walls had all been paneled in dark, polished wood. It was a comfortable place, almost what free Qeng Ho might make….
The parlor’s tables were carved with the names of people you might not have seen for years, people on Watch shifts that didn’t overlap your own. The picture above the bar was a continuously updated copy of Nau’s Watch Chart. As with most things, the Emergents used standard Qeng Ho notation. A single glance at the chart and you could see how many Msecs—objective time or personal—it would be before you ever met any particular person.
During Ezr’s off-Watch, Benny had added to the Watch Chart. Now it showed the current Spider date, in Trixia’s notation: 60//21. The twenty-first year of the current Spider “generation,” which was the sixtieth sun-cycle since the founding of some dynasty or other. There was an old Qeng Ho saying, “You know you’ve stayed too long when you start using the locals’ calendar.” 60//21. Twenty-one years since the Relight, since Jimmy and the others had died. After the generation and year number, there were the day number and the time in Ladille “hours” and “minutes,” a base-sixty system that the translators had never bothered to rationalize. And now everyone who came to the bar could read those times as easily as they could read a Qeng Ho chron. They knew to the second when Trixia’s show would begin.
Trixia’s show.Ezr ground his teeth hard together. A public slave show, and the worst of it was that no one seemed to care.Bit by bit, we arebecoming Emergents.
Jau Xin and Rita Liao and half a dozen other couples—two of them Qeng Ho—were clustered around their usual tables, babbling about what might happen today. Ezr sat at the periphery of the group, fascinated and repelled. Nowadays, even some of the Emergents were his friends. Jau Xin, for instance. Xin and Liao had much of
