by Vernor Vinge
Access took special knowledge and some concentration. It was not something that could happen by accident or under coercion. Pham relaxed in the hammock, partly to pretend to finally fall asleep, partly to get in the mood for his coming work. He needed a particular pattern of heartbeats, a particular cadence of breathing. Do I even remember it anymore, after all this time? The sharp moment of panic took him aback. One mote by his eye, another in his ear; that should be enough to provide alignment for the other localizers that must be floating in the room. That should be enough.
But the proper mood still eluded him. He kept thinking back to Anne Reynolt and to what Silipan had shown him. The Focused would see through his schemes; it was just a matter of time. Focus was a miracle. Pham Nuwen could have made the Qeng Ho a true empire—despite Sura’s treachery—if only he’d had Focused tools. Yes, the price was high. Pham remembered the rows of zombies up in Hammerfest’s Attic. He could see a dozen ways to make the system gentler, but in the end, to use Focused tools, there would have to be some sacrifice.
Was final success, a true Qeng Ho empire, worth that price? Could he pay it?
Yes and yes!
At this rate he’d never achieve access state. He backed off, began the whole relax cycle again. He let his imagination slide into memories. What had it been like in the beginning times? Sura Vinh had delivered the Reprise and a still very naive Pham Nuwen to the megalopolis moons of Namqem…
He had remained at Namqem for fifteen years. They were the happiest years of Pham Nuwen’s life. Sura’s cousins were in-system, too—and they fell in love with the schemes that Sura and her young barbarian proposed: a method of interstellar synchronization, the trading of technical tricks where their own buying and selling would not be affected, the prospect of a cohesive interstellar trading culture. (Pham learned not to talk about his goals beyond that.) Sura’s cousins were back from some very profitable adventures, but they could see the limits of isolated trading. Left to themselves, they would make fortunes, even keep them for a time…but in the end they would be lost in time and the interstellar dark. They had a gut appreciation for many of Pham’s goals.
In some ways, his time with Sura at Namqem was like their first days on the Reprise. But this went on and on, the imaginings and the teaming ever richer. And there were wonders that his hard head with all its grandiose plans had never considered: children. He had never imagined how different a family could be from the one of his birth. Ratko, Butra, and Qo were their first little ones. He lived with them, taught them, played blinkertalk and evercatch with them, showed them the wonders of the Namqem world park. Pham loved them far more than himself, and almost as much as he loved Sura. He almost abandoned the Grand Schedule to stay with them. But there would be other times, and Sura forgave him. When he returned, thirty years later, Sura awaited, with news of other parts of the Plan well under way. But by then their first three children were themselves avoyaging, playing their own part in founding the new Qeng Ho.
Pham ended up with a fleet of three starships. There were setbacks and disasters. Treachery. Zamle Eng leaving him for dead in Kielle’s comet cloud. Twenty years he was fleetless at Kielle, making himself a trillionaire from scratch, just to escape the place.
Sura flew with him on several missions, and they raised new families on half a dozen worlds. A century passed. Three. The mission protocols they had devised on the old Reprise served them well, and across the years there were reunions with children and children’s children. Some were greater friends than Ratko or Butra or Qo, but he never loved them quite so much. Pham could see the new structure emerging. Now it was simply trade, sometimes leavened with family ties. It would be much more.
The hardest thing was the realization that they needed someone at the center, at least in the early centuries. More and more Sura stayed behind, coordinating what Pham and others undertook.
And yet they still had children. Sura had new sons and daughters while Pham was light-years away. He joked with her about the miracle, though in truth he was hurt at the thought she had other lovers. Sura had smiled gently and shook her head. “No, Pham, any child I call my own is also of you.” Her smile turned mischievous. “Over the years, you have stuffed me with enough of yourself to birth an army. I can’t use that gift all at once, but use it I will.”
“No clones.” Pham’s word came out sharper than he intended.
“Lord, no.” She looked away. “I…one of you is all I can handle.” Maybe she was just as superstitious as he was. Or maybe not: “No, I’m using you in natural zygotes. I’m not always the other donor, or the only other donor. Namqem medics are very good at this kind of thing.” She turned back, and saw the look on his face. “I swear, Pham, every one of your children has a family. Every one is loved… We need them, Pham. We need families and Great Families. The Plan needs them.” She jabbed at him playfully, trying to jolly the disapproval from his face. “Hey, Pham! Isn’t this the wet dream of every conquering barbarian lord? Well, I’ll tell you, you’ve outfathered the greatest of them.”
Yes. Thousands of children by dozens of partners, raised without personal cost to the father. His own father had unsuccessfully attempted something much smaller with his campaign of regicide and concubinage in the North Coast states. Pham was getting it all without the murder, without the violence. And yet…how long had Sura been doing this? How many children, and by how many “donors”? He could imagine her now, planning bloodlines, slotting the right talents into the founding of each new Family, dispersing them throughout the new Qeng Ho. He felt the strangest double vision as he turned the situation around in his mind. As Sura said, it was a barbarian wet dream…but it was also a little like being raped.
“I would have told you at the beginning, Pham. But I was afraid you would object. And this is so important.” In the end, Pham did not object. It would advance their Plan. But it hurt to think of all the children he would never know.
Voyaging at 0.3c, Pham Nuwen traveled far. Everywhere there were Traders, though beyond thirty light-years, they rarely called themselves “Qeng Ho.” It didn’t matter. They could understand the Plan. The ones he met spread the ideas still farther. Wherever they went—and farther, since some were convinced simply by the radio messages Pham sent across the dark—the spirit of the Qeng Ho was spread.
Pham returned to Namqem again and again, bending the Grand Schedule almost to its breaking point. Sura was aging. She was two or three centuries old now. Her body was at the limit of what medical science could make young and supple. Even some of their children were old, living too long in port amid their voyaging. And sometimes in Sura’s eyes, Pham glimpsed unknowable experience.
Each time he returned to Namqem, he tossed the question up at her. Finally, one night after love almost as good as they had ever had, he came close to bawling. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, Sura! The Plan was for both of us. Come away with me. At least, go avoyaging.” And we can meet again and again, however long we live.
Sura leaned back from him and slipped her hand behind his neck. Her smile was crooked and sad. “I know. We thought we could both be flyabouts. Strange that that’s the biggest mistake we had in all our original scheming. But, be honest. You know that one of us has to stay in some central place, has to deal with the Plan almost in one long Watch.” There were a trillion little details involved in conquering the universe, and they couldn’t be handled while you were in coldsleep.
“Yes, in the early centuries. But not for…not for your whole life!”
Sura shook her head, her hand brushing gently at his neck. “I’m afraid we were wrong.” She saw the look on his face, the anguish, and she drew him down to her. “My poor barbarian prince.” He could hear the fond, mocking smile in her words. “You are my unique treasure. And do you know why? You’re a flaming genius. You’re driven. But the reason I’ve always loved you is something more. Inside your head, you are such a contradiction. Little Pham grew up in a rundown suburb of Hell. You saw betrayal and
you were betrayed. You understand violent evil as well as the most bloody-handed villain. And yet, little Pham also bought into all the myths of chivalry and honor and quest. Somehow in your head, both live at once, and you’ve spent your life trying to make the universe fit your contradictions. You will come very close to achieving that goal, close enough for me or any reasonable person—but maybe not close enough to satisfy yourself. So. I must stay if our Plan is to succeed. And you must go for the same reason. Unfortunately you know that, don’t you, Pham?”
Pham looked out the real windows that surrounded Sura’s penthouse. They were at the top of an office spire sticking high out of Namqem’s largest megalopolis moon. Tarelsk office real estate prices were in a frenzy that was downright absurd considering the power of network communication. The last time this tower had been on the open market, the annual rental on the penthouse floor could have bought a starship. For the last seventy years, Qeng Ho Families—mostly his and Sura’s descendants—had owned the spire and huge swaths of the surrounding office territory. It was the smallest part of their holdings, a nod to fashion.
Just now, it was early evening. The crescent of Namqem hung low in the sky; the lights of the Tarelsk business district rivaled the mother world’s glow. The Vinh & Mamso shipyards would rise in another Ksec or so. Vinh & Mamso were probably the largest yards in Human Space. Yet even that was a small part of their Families’ wealth. And beyond that—stretching ever more tenuously to the limits of Human Space, but growing still—was the cooperative wealth of the Qeng Ho. He and Sura had founded the greatest trading culture in the history of all time. That was how Sura saw it. That was all she ever saw. It was all she ever wanted. Sura didn’t mind that she wouldn’t live in the era of their final success…because she thought it would never come.
So Pham stilled the tears that waited behind his eyes. He slipped his arms gently around Sura, and kissed her neck. “Yes, I know,” he finally said.
Pham postponed his departure from Namqem for two years, five. He stayed so long that the Grand Schedule itself was broken. There would be appointments missed. Any more delay and the Plan itself might fail. And when he finally left Sura, something died inside him. Their partnership survived, even their love, in some abstract way. But a chasm of time had opened between them and he knew they could never bridge it again.
By the time he had lived one hundred years, Pham Nuwen had seen more than thirty solar systems, a hundred cultures. There were Traders who had seen more, but not many. Certainly Sura, huddled in planning mode back on Namqem, never saw what Pham did. Sura had only books and histories, reports from far away.
For sessile civilizations, even space-faring ones, nothing lasted forever. It was something of a miracle that the human race had survived long enough to escape Earth. There were so many ways that an intelligent race could make itself extinct. Deadlocks and runaways, plagues, atmosphere catastrophes, impact events—those were the simplest dangers. Humankind had lived long enough to understand some of the threats. Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, it ossified and politics carried it into a fall. Pham Nuwen had been born on Canberra in the depths of a dark age. He knew now that the disaster had been mild by some standards—after all, the human race had survived on Canberra even though it lost its high technology. There were worlds that Pham visited multiple times during his first hundred years. Sometimes, it was centuries between the visits. He saw the utopia that had been Neumars fade into overpopulated dictatorship, the ocean cities becoming slums for billions. Seventy years later, he came back to a world with a population of one million, a world of small villages, of savages with painted faces and hand-axes and songs of heartbreak. The voyage would have been a bust, if not for the chants of Vilnios. But Neumars was lucky compared to the dead worlds. Old Earth had been recolonized from scratch four times since the diaspora began.
There had to be a better way, and every new world Pham saw made him more sure that he knew that better way. Empire. A government so large that the failure of an entire solar system would be a manageable disaster. The Qeng Ho trading culture was a start. It would become the Qeng Ho trading empire…and someday a true, governing empire. For the Qeng Ho were in a unique position. At its peak, a Customer civilization possessed extraordinary science—and sometimes made marginal improvements over the best that had ever existed before. Most often, these improvements died when the civilization died. The Qeng Ho, however—they went on forever, patiently gathering the best that could be found. To Sura, that was the Qeng Ho’s greatest trading edge.
To Pham Nuwen, it was more. Why should we trade back all that we learn? Some, yes. That is largely how we make our living. But let us take the glittering peaks of all human progress—and hold them for the good of all.
That was how the “Qeng Ho” localizers had come to be. Pham had been aground on Trygve Ytre, as far from Namqem as he had ever voyaged. The people were not even from the same ur-stock as the humans of familiar parts of Human Space.
Trygve’s sun was one of those dim little M stars, the vermin of the colonizable galaxy. There were dozens of such stars for every one that was like Old Earth’s sun—and most had planets. They were dangerous places to settle, the stellar ecosphere so narrow that a civilization without technology could not exist. In the early millennia of Humankind’s conquest of space, that fact had been ignored, and a number of such worlds had been colonized. Ever optimistic, these humans, thinking their technology would last forever. And then at the first Fall, millions of people were left on a world of ice—or a world of fire, if the planet was on the inner side of their star’s ecosphere.
Trygve Ytre was a slightly safer variant, and a common situation: The star was accompanied by a giant planet, Trygve, which orbited a bit outside of the primary’s ecosphere. The giant planet had just two moons, one of them Earth-sized. Both were inhabited in the era when Pham visited. But the larger, Ytre, was the gem. Tidal and direct heating from Trygve supplemented the sun’s meager output. Ytre had land and air and liquid oceans. The humans of Trygve Ytre had survived at least one collapse of their civilization.
What they had now was a technology as high as Humankind ever attained. Pham’s little fleet of starships was welcomed, found decent shipyards in the asteroid belt that lay a billion kilometers out from the sun. Pham left crews aboard the ships, and took local transport inward, to Trygve and Ytre. This was no Namqem, but these people had seen other Traders. They had also seen Pham’s ramscoops and his preliminary trading list…and most of what Pham had did not measure up to Ytre’s native magics.
Nuwen stayed on Ytre for a time, some weeks the locals called the unit, the 600Ksec or so that it took giant Ytre to orbit Trygve. Trygve itself orbited the sun in just over 6Msec. So the Ytreisch calendar worked out neatly to ten weeks.
Though the world teetered between fire and ice, much of Ytre was habitable. “We have a more climate-stable world than Old Earth itself,” the locals bragged. “Ytre is deep within Trygve’s gravity well, with no significant perturbers. The tidal heating has been mellow across a geologic time.” And even the dangers were no big surprise. The M3 sun was just over one degree across. A foolish person could look directly at the reddish disk, see the whorling of gasses, see sunspots vast and dark. A few seconds of such sungazing could cause serious retinal burns, since of course the star was far brighter in the near-IR than in visible light. The recommended eye protectors looked like clear plastic, but Pham was very careful to wear them.
His hosts—a group of local companies—put him up at their expense. He spent his official time trying to learn more of their language and trying to discover something his fleet had brought that might be worth something to his customers. They were trying just as hard. It was something like industrial espionage in reverse. The locals’ electronics was a little better than Pham had ever seen, though there were program improvements the Qeng Ho might suggest. Their medical automation was significantly b
ackward; that would be his foot in the door, a place to haggle from.
Pham and his staff categorized all the things they might bring from this encounter. It would pay for the voyage and more. But Pham heard rumors. His hosts represented a number of—“cartels” was the nearest translation that Pham could make of the word. They hid things from one another. The rumor was of a new type of localizer, smaller than any made elsewhere, and needing no internal power supply. Any improvement in localizers was a profitable item; the gadgets were the positional glue that made embedded systems so powerful. But these “super” localizers were alleged to contain sensors and effectors. If it was anything more than rumor, it would have political and military consequences on Ytre itself—destabilizing consequences.
By now, Pham Nuwen knew how to collect information in a technical society, even one where he wasn’t a fluent speaker, even one where he was being watched. In four weeks he knew which cartel might have the maybe-existent invention. He knew the name of its magnate: Gunnar Larson. The Larson cartel had not mentioned the invention in their trading negotiations. It was not on the table—and Pham didn’t want to hint about it when others were present. He arranged a face-to-face meeting with Larson. It was the sort of thing that would have made sense even to Pham’s aunts and uncles back on medieval Canberra, though the technical subterfuge behind the meeting would have been unintelligible to them.