Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  Tomas laughed. “You really like stabilizing the intrinsically unstable, don’t you, Qiwi! Well…you did it for the rockpile, maybe you can do it here.”

  She shrugged. “Sure I can. With a restricted shoreline, I could even do it with Emergent localizers.”

  Tomas turned to look at her, and now she saw no visions before his eyes. He was back in the hard sterile world of the diamond cavern. But he had seen the wonder, and she knew she had pleased him. “It would be marvelous…a lot of resources, though, and a lot of work.” Work by nonzipheads, he meant. Even Tomas didn’t think of the Focused as real people.

  “It won’t get in the way of important things. The valves are scrap. The localizers are surplus. And people owe me lots of favors.”

  After a time, Nau led his woman and the ziphead back out of the cavern. Qiwi had surprised him once again, this time more spectacularly than usual. And damn. This was just another reason why they needed the localizers in Hammerfest. Reynolt’s people still hadn’t cleared the devices; just how complicated could that be? Leave it for later. Qiwi said they could get some kind of lake even with Emergent localizers.

  They went back up through the lower levels, acknowledging the various salutes and waves of techs, both Emergent and former Qeng Ho. They dropped Ali Lin off in the garden park that was his workshop. Qiwi’s father wasn’t caged in the Attic honeycomb. In fact, his specialty demanded open spaces and living things. At least, that was how Tomas Nau presented the issue to Qiwi. It was plausible, and it meant the girl was not continually exposed to the usual face of Focused operations; that helped slow her inevitable slide toward understanding.

  “You have to go over to the temp, Qiwi?”

  “Yes, some errands. To see some friends.” Qiwi had her trades to accomplish, her favors to collect.

  “Okay.” He swept her up in a kiss, visible the length of the office hall. No matter. “You did well, my love!”

  “Thanks.” Her smile was a dazzling thing. Over thirty years old, and Qiwi Lisolet still hung on his approval. “See you this evening.”

  She departed up the central shaft, pulling herself hand over hand faster and faster, all but rocketing past the other people in the shaft. Qiwi still practiced every day in a two-gee centrifuge, still practiced the martial killing arts. It was all that was left of her mother’s influence, at least all that was visible. No doubt a lot of her driving energy was some sort of sublimated effort to please her mother.

  Nau looked up, almost oblivious of the people coming down around him; they would stay out of his way. He watched her figure dwindle into the heights of the main shaft.

  After Anne Reynolt, Qiwi was his most precious possession. But he had essentially inherited Reynolt; Qiwi Lin Lisolet was his personal triumph, a brilliant, unFocused person, working unstintingly for him for all these years. Owning her, manipulating her—it was a challenge that never got stale. And there was always an edge of danger. She had the strength and speed, at least, to kill with her hands. He hadn’t understood that in the early years. But that was also before he had realized what a valuable thing she was.

  Yes, she was his triumph, but Tomas Nau was realistic enough to know he’d been lucky, too. He had first possessed Qiwi at just the right age and context—when she was old enough to have absorbed a depth of Qeng Ho background, yet young enough to be molded by the Diem Massacre. In the first ten years of the Exile, she had seen through his lies only three times.

  A little smile quirked his lips. Qiwi thought she was changing him, that she had shown him how well the methods of freedom worked. Well, she was right. In the early years, allowing the underground economy had been part of the game he was playing with her, a temporary weakness. But the underground economy really worked. Even the Qeng Ho texts claimed that free markets should be meaningless in an environment as closed and limited as this. And yet, year by year, the Peddlers had made things better—even for operations that Nau would have required anyway. So now, when she assured him that people owed her favors, that they would work really hard to make the lake park—Pestilence, I really want that lake—Tomas Nau didn’t laugh behind his hand at her. She was right: the people—even the Emergents—would do better on that park because they owed Qiwi than they would because Tomas Nau was Podmaster with the ultimate power to space them all.

  Qiwi was a tiny figure at the very top of the shaft. She turned and waved. Nau waved back, and she disappeared to the side, down one of the taxi access tunnels.

  Nau stood a moment longer, staring upward with a smile on his face. Qiwi had taught him the power of managed freedom. Uncle Alan and the Nauly clique had bequeathed him the power of Focused slaves. And the OnOff star…? The more they learned of the star and its planet, the more he had the awed conviction that there were miracles hiding here, maybe not the treasures they had expected, but much greater things. The biology, the physics, the star system’s far galactic orbit…their combined implications were just beyond the analysts’ comprehension, teasing at his intuition.

  And in a few years, the Spiders would hand him an industrial ecology with which to exploit it all.

  There had never been a place and a time in the histories of Humankind where so much opportunity had come to one man. Twenty-five years ago, a younger Tomas Nau had quailed before the uncertainties. But the years had passed, and step by step he had met the problems and mastered them. What came out of Arachna would be the power of a dynasty like none Humankind had ever seen. It would take time, perhaps another century or two, but he would scarcely be out of Qeng Ho middle age by the end of it. He could sweep the Emergent cliques aside. This end of Human Space would see the greatest empire in all the histories. The legend of Pham Nuwen would pale in the light that Tomas Nau would cast.

  And Qiwi? He cast a final look upward. He hoped she would last through the end of the Exile. There were so many things she could help him with when they took the Spiders down. But the mask was fraying. Mindscrub was not perfect; Qiwi was catching on faster than in the early years. Without destroying large amounts of brain tissue, Anne could not eliminate what she called “residual neural weighting.” And of course there were some contradictions that coldsleep amnesia could not plausibly cover. Eventually, even with the most skillful manipulation…How could he explain reneging on his promises of manumission? How could he explain the measures he would take against the Spiders, or the human breeding programs that would be necessary? No. Inevitably, but most regrettably, he would have to dispose of Qiwi. And yet, even then she could still serve him. Children by her would still be possible. Someday his reign would need heirs.

  Qiwi pulled into Benny’s parlor about two thousand seconds later. And it was Benny running things this Watch. Good. He was her favorite master of the parlor. They dickered for a moment over the new gear he wanted. “Lord, Benny! You need more wallpaper? There are other projects that could use some, you know.” Like a certain park under Hammerfest.

  Benny shrugged. “Get the Podmaster to allow consensual imaging, and I won’t need wallpaper. But the stuff just wears out. See?” He waved at the floor, where the image of Arachna was a permanent fixture. She could see a storm system that would probably reach Princeton in a few Ksecs; certainly the display drivers were still alive. But she could also see the distortions and the colored smudges.

  “Okay, we still have some to strip out of the Invisible Hand, but it’ll cost you.” Ritser Brughel would froth and shriek, even though he had no use for the wallpaper. Ritser regarded the Hand as his private fiefdom. She looked at Benny’s handwritten list, at the other items. The finished foods were all from the temp’s bactry and ags—Gonle Fong would want to handle that. Volatiles and feedstock, aha. As usual, Benny was negotiating on the side for those, trying to short-circuit Gonle by going directly to the mining operation on the rockpile. For best friends, the two took their business competition awfully seriously.

  At the edge of her vision, something moved. She glanced up. Over by the ceiling, Xin’s gang was hanging out in its
usual place. Ezr! An involuntary smile spread across Qiwi’s face. He had turned from the others, was looking in her direction. She waved to him. Ezr’s face seemed to close down, and he turned away. For a moment, a lot of old pain floated up in Qiwi’s mind. Even now, when she saw him, there was always this quick, involuntary twinge of joy, like seeing a dear friend you have so much to say to. But the years had passed, and every time he turned away. She hadn’t meant to harm Trixia Bonsol; she helped Tomas because he was a good man, a man who was doing his best to bring them through the Exile.

  She wondered if Ezr would ever let her close enough to explain. Maybe. There were years to come. At Exile’s end, when they had a whole civilization to help them and Trixia was returned to him—surely then he would forgive.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The space between the temp’s outer skin and the habitable balloons was a buffer against blowouts. Over the years, various of Gonle Fong’s farming rackets had used the space; a pressure loss would have killed some truffles or her experiments with Canberra flowers. Even now, Fong’s ags occupied only a part of the dead space. Pham met Ezr Vinh well away from the little farm plots. Here the air was still and cold, and the only light was OnOff’s dim glow seeping through the outer wall.

  Pham hooked his foot under a wall stop and waited quietly. Earlier in the Watch, he had made sure that these volumes were well populated with localizers. They were scattered here and there on the walls. A few always floated in the air around him, though even in bright light they would have been scarcely more than dustmotes. And so, hiding here in the twilight, Pham was a one-man command post. He could hear and see from wherever he commanded—just now, the airgap between the balloons. Someone was approaching cautiously. At the back of his eyes he had vision now, almost as good as Qeng Ho huds. It was the Vinh boy, looking nervous and stealthy.

  How old was Vinh now, thirty? Not really a kid anymore. But he still had that cast to his features, that serious manner…just like Sura. Not a person to trust, oh no. But hopefully a person he could use.

  Vinh appeared to the naked eye, coming around the curve of the inner balloon. Pham raised a hand and the boy stopped, sucked in a breath of surprise. For all his caution, Vinh had almost passed Pham by, not noticing him floating in the inward notch of the wall fabric. “I—Hello.” Vinh was whispering.

  Pham floated out from the wall, to where the light of OnOff was a little better. “We meet at last,” he said, giving the boy a lopsided smile.

  “Y-yes. Truly.” Ezr turned, looked at him for a long moment, and then gave—Lord!—a little bow. His Sura features spread into a shy smile. “It’s strange to actually see you, not Pham Trinli.”

  “Hardly a visible difference.”

  “Oh sir, you don’t know. When you are Trinli, all the little things are different. Here, even in this light, you look different. If Nau or Reynolt saw you for even ten seconds, they would know, too.”

  The kid had an overactive imagination. “Well, the only thing they’re seeing for the next two thousand seconds is the lies my localizers are feeding them. Hopefully, that’s long enough to get you started—”

  “Yes! You can actually see with the localizers, you can actually input commands to them?”

  “With enough practice.” He showed the boy where to set localizer grains around the orbit of his eye, and how to cue the nearby localizers to cooperate. “Don’t do that in public. The synthesized beam is very narrow, but might still be noticed.”

  Vinh stared as if sightless. “Ah, it’s like something is nibbling at the back of my eyes.”

  “The localizers are tickling your optic nerve directly. What pops up may be very weird at first. You can learn the commands with some simple exercises, but learning to make sense of the visual tickle…well, I guess that’s like learning to see again.” Pham guessed it was a lot like a blind man learning to use a visual prosthesis. Some people could do it, some remained blind. He didn’t say that out loud. Instead, he led Ezr through some test patterns, patterns that Vinh could practice with.

  Pham had thought a lot about just how much of the command interface to show the Vinh boy. But Ezr already knew enough to betray him. Short of killing him, there was no cure for that. All the bloody clues I laid, pointing at the Zamle Eng story, and he still picked up on the truth. Pray it was only his Great Family background that made that possible. Pham had kept him in ignorance for years now, watching for signs of counterscheming, trying to measure the boy’s actual ability. What he had seen was a compulsive, unsure adolescent coming of age in a tyranny—and still retaining some sense.

  When the crunch came, when Pham finally moved against Nau and Brughel, he would need someone to help pull all the strings. The boy should be taught some of the tricks…but there were nights Pham ground his teeth, thinking of the power he was handing to a Vinh.

  Ezr learned the command set very quickly. Now he should have no trouble learning the other techniques that Pham had opened for him. Full vision would come slowly, but—

  “Yes, I know you still can’t see more than flashes of light. Just keep trying the test patterns. In a few Msecs, you’ll be as good as I am.” Almost as good.

  Just the assurance seemed to calm the boy. “Okay, I’ll practice and practice—all in my room, as you say. This makes me feel…I don’t know, like I’ve accomplished more just now than I have in years.”

  One hundred seconds of the alloted time remained. The masking that disguised them to the snoops couldn’t be aborted. Never mind. Just react to the kid naturally. Platitudes. “You did plenty in the past. Together, we’ve learned a lot about the Hammerfest operation.”

  “Yes, but this will be different… What will things be like after we win, sir?”

  “Afterwards?” What not to say? “It will be…magnificent. We will have Qeng Ho technology and a planetary civilization very nearly capable of using it. By itself, that is the most powerful trading position any Qeng Ho has ever had. But we will have more. Given time, we’ll have ramdrives that take advantage of what we’ve learned from OnOff’s physics. And you know the DNA diversity on Arachna. That by itself is an enormous treasure, a box of surprises that could power—”

  “And all the Focused will be set free.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course. Don’t worry, Vinh, we’ll get Trixia back.” That was an expensive promise, but one Pham intended to keep. With Trixia Bonsol free, maybe Vinh would listen to reason about the rest. Maybe.

  Pham realized that the boy was looking at him strangely; he had let the silence stretch into unwelcome implications. “Okay. I think we’ve covered the ground. Practice the input language and the visual test patterns. For now, our time is up.” Thank the Lord of All Trade. “You take off first, back the way you came. The cover story is you got almost to the taxi port, then decided to go back to the dayroom for breakfast.”

  “Okay.” Vinh hesitated an instant, as if wanting to say more. Then he turned and floated back around the curve of the inner balloon.

  Pham watched the timer that hung at the back of his vision. In twenty seconds, he would depart in the other direction. The localizers had fed two thousand seconds of carefully planned lies back to Brughel’s snoops. Later, Pham would check it over for consistency with what was really going on throughout the rest of the temp. There would be some patching necessary, no doubt. This kind of meeting would have been easy if the enemy had been ordinary analysts. With ziphead snoops, covering your ass was a major exercise in paranoia.

  Ten seconds. He stared into the dimness at where Ezr Vinh had just disappeared. Pham Nuwen had a lifetime of experience in diplomacy and deception. So why the bloody hell wasn’t I smoother with the kid? The ghost of Sura Vinh seemed suddenly very close, and she was laughing.

  “You know, we really need to get localizers aboard Hammerfest.” The request had become a ritual at the beginning of Ritser Brughel’s security briefings. Today, maybe Ritser was in for a surprise.

  “Anne’s people haven’t finished their evaluation.�
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  The Vice-Podmaster leaned forward. Over the years, Ritser had changed more than most. Nowadays, he was on-Watch almost fifty percent, but he was also making heavy use of medical support and the Hammerfest gym. He actually looked healthier than he had during the early years. And somewhere along the way, he had learned to satisfy his…needs…without producing an unending stream of dead zipheads. He had grown to be a dependable Podmaster. “Have you seen Reynolt’s latest report, sir?”

  “Yes. She’s saying five more years.” Anne’s search for security holes in the Peddler localizers was close to impossible. In the early years, Tomas had been more hopeful. After all, the Qeng Ho security hackers had had no ziphead support. But the quagmire of Qeng Ho software was almost eight thousand years deep. Every year, Anne’s zipheads pushed back their deadline for certainty another year or two. And now this latest report.

  “Five more years, sir. She might as well be saying ‘never.’ We both know how unlikely it is that these localizers are a danger. My zipheads have been using them for twelve years on the temp and in the junked starships. My zips aren’t programmer specialists, but I’ll tell you, in all that time the localizers have come up as clean as anything Qeng Ho. These gadgets are so useful, sir. Nothing gets past them. Not using them has its own risks.”

  “Such as?”

  Nau saw the other’s faint start of surprise; this was more encouragement than Ritser had received in some time. “Um. Such as the things we miss because we aren’t using them. Let’s just look at the current briefing.” There followed a not-too-relevant discourse on all the recent security concerns: Gonle Fong’s attempts to acquire automation for her black-market farms; the perverse affection people of all factions had developed for the Spiders—a desirable sublimation, but a potential problem when the time for real action finally arrived; the proper level for Anne’s paranoia. “I know you monitor her, sir, but I think she’s drifting. It’s not just this fixation about system trapdoors. She’s become significantly more possessive of ‘her’ zipheads.”