For a moment, all he heard was buzzing and hissing; maybe Pham wasn’t saying anything. Then: “Vinh, I think very much the opposite. In the long run, she’s the deadliest threat we face.”
“But she’s not in Security.”
“No, but she maintains Brughel’s snoops, tweaks up their poor brains when they begin to drift. Phuong and Hom can only do the simpler cases; Trud pretends he can do everything, but he just follows her directions. And she has eight ziphead programmers going through our fleet code. Three of them are still grinding away at the localizers. Eventually, she’s going to see how I’ve scammed them. bzzz mumble Lord! The power Nau has.” Pham’s voice cut out, and there was just the background noise.
Ezr reached out from his blankets and stuck a finger in his ear, pushing the tiny localizer deeper. “Say again? Are you still there?”
bzzt “I’m here. About Reynolt: She’s deadly. One way or another, she must be removed.”
“Kill her?” The words caught in Ezr’s throat. For all he that he hated Nau and Brughel and the whole system of Focus, he didn’t hate Anne Reynolt. In her own limited way, she looked after the slaves. Whatever Anne Reynolt had been, now she was just a tool.
“I hope not! Maybe… if Nau would just take the bait on the localizers, if he would just start using them in Hammerfest. Then we’d be as safe over there as we are here. If that happens before her zips figure out that it’s a trap…”
“But the whole point of the delay was to give her time to study the localizers.”
“Yeah. Nau is no fool. Don’t worry. I’m tracking things. If she gets too close, I’ll… take care of her.”
For a moment, Ezr tried to imagine what Pham might do, then forced his mind from the imaginings. Even after two thousand years, the Vinh Family still had a special place in its affection for the memory of Pham Nuwen. Ezr remembered the pictures that had been in his father’s den. He remembered the stories his aunt had told him. Not all of them were in the Qeng Ho archives. That meant the stories weren’t true—or else they were truly private reminiscences, what G’mama Sura and her children had really thought of Pham Nuwen. They loved him for more than founding the modern Qeng Ho, for more than being g’papa to all the Vinh Families. But some of the stories showed a hard side to the man.
Ezr opened his eyes, looked quietly around the darkened room. Vague night-gleams lit his fatigues floating in the closet sack, showed the delitesse still sitting uneaten on his desk. Reality. “What can you really do with the localizers, Pham?”
Silence. Faraway buzzing. “What can I do? Well, Vinh, I can’t kill with them… not directly. But they are good for more than this crummy audio link. It takes practice; there are tricks you have to see.” Long pause. “Hell, you need to learn ’em. There could be times when I’m out of link, and they’re the only things that can save your cover. We should get together in person—”
“Huh? Face-to-face? How?” Dozens, maybe hundreds of times he and Pham Nuwen had plotted as they did tonight, like prisoners tapping anonymously on dungeon walls. In public, they saw less of each other than in the early Watches. Nuwen had said that Ezr just wasn’t good enough at controlling his eyes and body language, that the snoops would guess too much. Now—
“Here in the temp, Brughel and his zipheads are depending on the localizers. There are places ’tween the balloon hulls where some of their old cameras have died. If we run into each other there, they’ll have nothing to contradict what I feed them through the localizers. The problem is, I’m sure the snoops rely on statistics as much as anything. Once upon a time I ran a fleet security department, like Ritser’s except a bit more mellow. I had programs that highlighted suspicious behavior—who was out of sight when, unusual conversations, equipment failures. It worked pretty well, even when I couldn’t catch the bad guys red-handed. Zipheads plus computers should be a thousand times better. I bet they have stat traces extending back to the beginning of L1. For them, innocuous behaviors add up and add up—and one fine day Ritser Brughel has circumstantial evidence. And we’re dead.”
Lord of Trade. “But we could get away with almost anything!” Wherever the Emergents depended on Qeng Ho localizers.
“Maybe. Once. Curb the impulse.” Even in the buzzing speech, Ezr could tell that Pham was chuckling.
“When can we meet?”
“Sometime that minimizes the effect on Ritser’s merry analysts. Let’s see… I’m going off-Watch in less than two hundred Ksec. I’ll be partway through a Watch the next time you are on. I’ll fix things so we can do it right after that.”
Ezr sighed.Half a year of lifetime away. But not as far away as some things; it would do.
THIRTY-FOUR
Benny’s booze parlor had begun as something sublegal, the visible evidence of a large network of black- market transactions—capital crimes by Emergent standards; in pure Qeng Ho Nese, the term “black market” existed, but only to denote “trade you must do in secret because it offends the local Customers.” In the small community around the rockpile, there was no way to conduct trade or bribe in secret. During the early years, only Qiwi Lisolet’s involvement had protected the parlor. Now… Benny Wen smiled to himself as he stacked the drinks and dinners into his weir. Now he managed here full time whenever he was on-Watch. Best of all, it was a job his father could mostly handle when Benny and Gonle were off. Hunte Wen was still a drifty, gentle soul, and he had never regained his competence in physics. But he had come to love managing the parlor. When he managed it alone, strange things could happen to the place. Sometimes they were ludicrous failures, sometimes marvelous improvements. There was the time he cadged a perfumed lacquer from the volatiles refinery. The smell was okay in small quantities, but painted on the parlor’s walls, it gave off a terrible stink. For a while the largest dayroom became the social hub of the temp. There was another time—four real years later—when he redeemed a Watch’s worth of favor scrip, and Qiwi’s papa devised a zero-gee vine and associated ecosystem to decorate the parlor’s walls and furniture. The place was transformed into a beautiful, parklike space.
The vines and flowers still remained, even though Hunte had been off-Watch for almost two years.
Benny moved up from the bar, in a long circuit through the forest of greenery. Drinks and food were delivered to tables of customers, paper favors paid in return. Benny set a Diamonds and Ice and a meal bucket in front of Trud Silipan. Silipan slipped him a promise-of-favor with the same smug look as always. He obviously figured the promise counted for nothing, that he only paid off because it was convenient.
Benny just smiled and moved on. Who was he to argue—and in a sense, Trud was right. But since the early Watches, very few favors were ever flatly repudiated. Weaseled, yes. The only favors Trud could really give involved service time with the Focused, and he constantly chiseled on his obligations, not finding quite the right specialists, not spending enough ziphead time to get the best answers. But even Trud came through often enough, as with the zero-gee vines he’d caused Ali Lin to design. For behind the farce of paper favors, everyone knew that there was Tomas Nau, who—from clever self-interest or love of Qiwi—had made it clear that the Qeng Ho underground economy had his protection.
“Hello, Benny! Up here!” Jau Xin waved to him from the upper table, the “debating society” table. Watch on Watch, the same sort of people seemed to hang out here. There was usually some overlap between Watches— apparently enough so that even when most of the customers were different, they still sat over here if they wanted to argue about “where it will all end.” This Watch it was Xin and of course Rita Liao, five or six other faces that were no surprise, and—aha, someone who really knew his stuff: “Ezr! I thought it would be four hundred Ksec before you showed up here.” Damn if he didn’t wish he could stay and listen.
“Hi, Benny!” Ezr’s face showed the familiar grin. Funny when you didn’t see a guy for a while, how the changes from times earlier were suddenly sharp. Ezr—like Benny—was still a young man. But they were no longer kids. There were the faintest creases near Ezr’s eyes. And when he spoke, there was a confidence Benny had never seen when they had been on Jimmy Diem’s work crew. “Nothing solid for me, Benny. My gut is still complaining about being unfrozen. There was a four-day change in schedule.” He pointed at the Watch-tree display on the wall by the bar. Sure enough, the update was there, hidden in a flurry of other small changes. “Looks like Anne Reynolt has need of my presence.”
Rita Liao smiled. “That by itself is reason for a meeting of the Debating Society.”
