by Vernor Vinge
But for himself…Nau allowed a moment of self-pity. Someone trustable and competent must stay on Watch till final recovery. There was only one such person, and his name was Tomas Nau. On his own, Ritser Brughel would foolishly kill resources that could not be spared—or do his best to kill Nau himself. On her own, Anne Reynolt could be trusted for years, but if something unexpected came up…Well, the Qeng Ho seemed thoroughly subdued, and after the interrogations, Nau was relatively sure that no big secrets remained. But if the Qeng Ho did again conspire, Anne Reynolt would be lost.
So Tomas Nau might be a hundred years old before he saw triumph here. That was middle-aged by Balacrean standards. Nau sighed. So be it. Qeng Ho medicine would more than make up for the time lost. And then—
The room shivered, a nearly inaudible groaning sound. Where Nau’s hand touched the wall, the vibration crept in along his bones. It was the third rock quake in the last 40Ksec.
On the far side of the room, the Peddler girl stirred in their bed. “Wha—?” Qiwi Lin Lisolet emerged from sleep, her motion lifting her out of the bed. She had been working for nearly three days straight, trying yet again to find a stable configuration for the rockpile. Lisolet’s gaze wobbled about. She probably didn’t even know what had wakened her. Her eyes fixed on Nau standing by the window, and a sympathetic smile spread across her face. “Oh, Tomas, you’re losing more sleep worrying about us?”
She reached out her arms, a comforting. Nau smiled shyly and nodded. Hell, what she said was even approximately true. He floated across the room, stopped himself with one hand against the wall behind her head. She wrapped her arms around him and they floated, slowly sinking, toward the bed below. He slid his arms toward her waist, felt her strong legs bend around his. “You’re doing everything you can, Tomas. Don’t try to do more. Things will be all right.” Her hands brushed gently against the hair at the back of his neck, and he felt the trembling in her. It was Qiwi Lisolet who worried, who would work herself to death if she thought it would add one percent to their overall chances of survival. They drifted silent for long seconds, till gravity drew them down to the froth of lace that was their bed.
Nau let his hands roam her flanks; he felt the worry slowly subside in her. Lots had gone wrong with this mission, but Qiwi Lin Lisolet could be counted as a small triumph. She had been fourteen—precocious, naive, willful—when Nau took down the Qeng Ho fleet. The girl was properly infected with mindrot. She could have been Focused; for a while he had considered making her his body toy. Thank the Plague I didn’t.
During the first couple of years, the girl had spent much of her time in this room, crying. Diem’s “murder” of her mother had made her the first wholehearted turncoat. Nau had spent Msecs comforting her. At first that had been simply an exercise in the persuasive arts, with the possible side effect that Qiwi might improve his credibility with the other Peddlers. But as time passed, Nau came to see that the girl was more dangerous and more useful than he had guessed. Qiwi had lived much of her childhood on-Watch during the voyage from Triland. She had used the time with almost Focused intensity, learning construction engineering, life-support technology, and trading practices. It was weird; why was one child given such special treatment? Like so many of the Qeng Ho factions, the Lisolet Family had its own secrets, its own interior culture. During the interrogations, he had squeezed the probable explanation out of the girl’s mother. The Lisolets used the time between the stars to mold those girl children who were intended for ruling positions in the Family. If things had gone according to Kira Pen Lisolet’s plans, the girl would have been ready for further instruction here in-system, totally dominated by her loyalty toward her mother.
As things turned out, this made the girl ideal for Tomas Nau’s purposes. She was young and talented, and desperately in need of someone in whom to invest her loyalty. He could run her Watch after Watch without coldsleep, just as he had to run himself. She would be a good companion for the time ahead—and one who was a constant test of his plans. Qiwi was smart and in many ways her personality was still very independent. Even now, with the evidence of what really happened to her mother and the others safely blown away, slipups could happen. Using Qiwi was a thrill ride, a constant test of his nerve. But at least he understood the danger now, and had taken precautions.
“Tomas—” She turned to face him directly. “Do you think I’ll ever get the rockpile stabilized?”
Indeed, that was a proper thing for her to worry about. Ritser Brughel—or even a younger Tomas Nau—would not have realized that the correct response was not a threat or even disapproval. “Yes, you’ll think of something. We’ll think of something. Take a few days’ vacation, okay? Old Trinli is off coldsleep this Watch. Let him balance the rockpile for a while.”
Qiwi’s laughter made her sound even younger than she looked. “Oh, yes. Pham Trinli!” He was the only one of Diem’s conspirators she had more contempt than anger for. “Remember the last time he ran the balance? He talks loud, but he started out so timid. Before he knew it, the rockpile was three meters per second off L1 track. Then he overreacted and—” She started laughing again. The strangest things made this Peddler girl laugh. It was one of the puzzles about her that still intrigued him.
Lisolet was silent for a moment, and when she finally spoke, she surprised the Podmaster. “Yeah…maybe you’re right. If it’s just four days, I can set things up so even Trinli can’t do too much damage. I do need to step back, think about things. Maybe we can water-weld the blocks after all…Besides, Papa is awake on this Watch. I’d like to be with him a little more.” She looked at him questioningly, implicitly asking for release from duty.
Hunh. Sometimes the manipulation didn’t work out as expected. He’d have bet three zipheads she wouldn’t take him up on the offer. I could still turn her back. He could agree with just enough reluctance to make her ashamed. No. It wasn’t worth it, not this time. And if one does not forbid, then be wholeheartedly generous in giving permission. He gathered her close. “Yes! Even you have to learn to relax.”
She sighed, smiled with a hint of mischievousness. “Oh, yes, but I’ve already learned that.” She reached down, and neither of them spoke for some time. Qiwi Lisolet was still a clumsy teenager, but she was learning. And Tomas Nau had years to teach her. Kira Pen Lisolet had not had nearly so much time, and had been a resisting adult. Nau smiled, remembering. Oh yes. In different ways, both mother and daughter had served him well.
Ali Lin had not been born into the Lisolet Family. He had been Kira Pen Lisolet’s external acquisition. Ali was one in a trillion, a genius when it came to parks and living things. And he was Qiwi’s father. Both Kira and Qiwi had loved him very much, even if he could never be what Kira was and what Qiwi would one day be.
Ali Lin was important to the Emergents, probably as important as any of the Focused. He was one of the few who had a lab outside the attic warrens of Hammerfest. He was one of the few who did not have Anne Reynolt or one of the lesser managers constantly watching out for him.
Now he and Qiwi sat in the treetops of the Qeng Ho park, playing a slow, patient game with the bugs. She had been here 10Ksec, and Papa some time more. He had her doing DNA diffs on the new strains of garbage spiders he’d been breeding. Even now, he seemed to trust her with that work, only checking her results every Ksec or so. The rest of the time he was lost in his examination of the leaves and a sort of daydreaming contemplation of how he might do the projects that Anne Reynolt had set for him.
Qiwi looked down past her feet, at the floor of the park. The trees were flowering amandors, bred for microgravity over thousands of years by people like Ali Lin. The leaves twisted down and down, bushing out so that their eyrie was almost invisible from the shadowed “below.” Even without gravity, the blue sky and the turn of the branches gave a subtle orientation to the park. The largest real animals were the butterflies and the bees. She could hear the bees, see an occasional erratic bullet of their flight. The butterflies were everywhere. T
he micro-gee varieties oriented on the false sunlight, so their flight provided the visitor with one more psychological cue about up and down. Right now the park was empty of other humans, officially closed for maintenance. That was something of a fib, but Tomas Nau had not called her on it. In fact, the park had just become too popular. The Emergents loved it at least as much as the Qeng Ho. The place was so popular that Qiwi could detect the beginnings of system failure; the little garbage spiders weren’t quite keeping up anymore.
She looked at her father’s abstracted features and smiled. This really was maintenance time, of a sort. “Here’s the latest set of diffs; is this what you’re looking for, Papa?”
“Hmm?” The other didn’t look up from his work. Then abruptly he seemed to hear. “Really? Let’s see, Qiwi.”
She slid the list across to him. “See? Here and here. This is the pattern match we were looking for. The imaginal disks will change just the way you wanted.” Papa wanted a higher metabolism, without losing the population bounds. In this park, the insects did not have bacterial predators; the contest for life went on within their genomes.
Ali took the list from her hands. He smiled gently, almost looking at her, almost noticing her. “Good, you got the multiplier trick just right.”
Hearing such words was about as close as Qiwi Lin Lisolet could come to recapturing the past. Age nine to fourteen had been Qiwi’s Lisoletish learning time. It had been a lonely time, but Mom had been right about it. Qiwi had come a long way toward growing up, learning to be alone in the great dark. She had learned about the life-support systems that were her father’s specialty, learned the celestial mechanics that made all her mother’s constructions possible, and most of all she had learned how much she loved to be around others during their waking times. Both her parents had spent several of those years out of coldsleep, sharing maintenance duty with her and the Watch techs.
Now Mama was dead and Papa was Focused, his soul concentrated down upon one thing: the biological management of ecosystems. But within that Focus, he and she could still communicate. In the years since the ambush, they had been together for Msecs of common Watch. Qiwi had continued to learn from him. And sometimes, when they were deep within the complexity of species stability, sometimes it was like before, in childhood, when Papa would get so trapped in his passion for living things that he seemed to forget his daughter was really a person, and they were both swallowed up by wonders greater than themselves.
Qiwi studied the diffs—but mostly she was watching her father. She knew he was very close to finishing the garbage-spider project, his part of it anyway. Long experience told her that there would be a few moments after that when Ali Lin would be approachable, when his Focus cast about for something new to bind on. Qiwi smiled to herself. And I have the project. It was almost what Reynolt and Tomas wanted from Papa, so diverting him would be possible if she played it just right.
There. Ali Lin sighed, gazing contentedly on the branches and leaves around them. Qiwi had maybe fifty seconds. She slipped downward from her branch, holding her position with the tip of her foot. She snagged the bonsai bubble she had smuggled in, and returned to her father. “Remember these, Papa? Really, really small parks?”
Papa didn’t ignore her words. He turned toward her as quickly as a normal person, and his eyes widened when he caught sight of the clear plastic sphere. “Yes! Except for light, a completely closed ecology.”
Qiwi floated the empty bubble into his hands. Bonsai bubbles were a commonplace in the confines of a ramscoop under way. They existed in all levels of sophistication, from lumps of moss up to things almost as complex as this temp’s park. And—“This is a little smaller than the problems we’ve been working on. I’m not sure your solutions would work here.”
Appeals to pride had often worked on the old Ali, almost as often as appeals to love. Now you had to catch Papa at just the right instant. He squinted at the bubble, seemed to feel the dimensions with his hands. “No, no! I can do it. My new tricks are very powerful…Would you like a little lake, maybe lipid bound to lie flat?”
Qiwi nodded.
“And those garbage spiders, I can make them smaller and give them colored wings.”
“Yes.” Reynolt would let him spend more effort on the garbage bugs. They were important for more than just the central park. So much had been destroyed in the fighting. Ali’s work would allow small-scale life-support modules all through the surviving structures. It was something that would normally take a Qeng Ho specialist team and deep searches of the fleet’s databases—but Papa was both Focused and a genius. He could do such design work all by himself, and in just a few Msecs.
Papa just needed a push in the right conceptual direction, something that old prune, Anne Reynolt, could rarely provide. So—
Ali Lin was suddenly grinning from ear to ear. “I bet I can top the Namqem High Treasures. Look, the filtration webs will carry straight across. The shrubs will be standard, maybe a little modified to support your insect diffs.”
“Yes, yes,” said Qiwi. They had a real conversation, several hundred seconds, before her father lapsed into the fierce concentration that would make the “simple changes” actually doable. The hardest part would be at the bacterial and mitochondrial level, and that was totally beyond Qiwi. She smiled at her father, almost reached out to touch his shoulder. Mama would be proud of them. Papa’s methods might even be new—they certainly weren’t in any of the obvious places in the historical dbs. Qiwi had guessed that they might allow some very nice microparks, but this was more than she had hoped for.
The High Treasure bonsais were no bigger than this, thirty centimeters across. Some of them had lived for two hundred years, complete animal/plant ecosystems—even supporting fake evolution. The method was proprietary and not even the Qeng Ho had been able to purchase all of it. Creating such things with only mission resources would be a miracle. If Papa could do better than that…hmm. Most people, even Tomas, seemed to think that Qiwi had been brought up to be an armsman, following her mother’s military career. They didn’t understand. The Lisolets were Qeng Ho. Fighting came a far second. Sure, she had learned a little about combat. Sure, Mama intended she spend a decade or two learning what to do When All Else Fails. But Trading was what everything came back to. Trading and making a profit. So they had been taken over by the Emergents. But Tomas was a decent person—and he had the hardest job she could imagine. She was doing everything she could to support him, to make what was left of their expeditions survive. Tomas couldn’t help that his culture was all screwed up.
And in the end it wouldn’t matter that Tomas didn’t understand. Qiwi smiled at the empty plastic sphere, imagining what it would be like filled with her father’s creation. In civilized places, a top bonsai might sell for the price of an entire starship. Here? Well, Qiwi might make these on the side. After all, it was a frivolity, something that Tomas probably couldn’t justify to himself. Tomas had banned hoarding and favor-trading. Uh-oh. Maybe I’ll have to work around him for a while. It was much easier to get permission afterward. In the end, she figured the Qeng Ho would change Tomas’s people far more than the reverse.
She was just starting a new diffs sequence when there was a ripping sound from below, the source hidden by the lower foliage. For a second, Qiwi didn’t recognize the sound. The floor access hatch. That was for construction only. Opening it would tear the moss layer. Damn.
Qiwi swung out from their little nest, and moved quietly downward, careful not to crack branches or cast a shadow on the bottom moss. Breaking in while the park was officially closed was only an annoyance—heck, it was the sort of thing she would do if she felt like it. But that floor hatch was not supposed to be opened. It spoiled the park’s illusion, and it damaged the turf. What sort of jackass would do something like that—especially considering how seriously Emergents took official rules and regulations?
Qiwi hovered just above the bottommost canopy of leaves. In a second the intruder would be in view, bu
t she could already hear him. It was Ritser Brughel. The Vice-Podmaster proceeded across the moss, cursing and whacking at something in the bushes. The guy was a real sewer-mouth. Qiwi was an avid student of such language, and she had listened to him before. Brughel might be the number-two boss man of the Emergent expedition—but he was also a one-man proof that Emergent leaders could be bums. Tomas seemed to realize the fellow was a bad actor; he’d put the Vice Podmaster’s quarters off the rockpile, on the old Invisible Hand. And Brughel’s Watch schedule was the same as much of the regular crew. While poor Tomas aged year after year to keep the mission safe, Brughel was out of coldsleep only 10Msec in every 40. So Qiwi didn’t know him very well—but what she knew she loathed. If this jerk could be trusted to pull his own weight, Tomas wouldn’t be burning his lifetime away for us. She listened in silence for a moment more. Neat stuff. But there was an undercurrent to it she didn’t hear in most folk’s obscenities, like the fellow meant what he was saying literally.
Qiwi pushed loudly between the branches, holding herself so that she stood half a meter in the air—about eye-to-eye with the Emergent. “The park is closed for maintenance, Podmaster.”
Brughel gave a tiny flinch of surprise. For a second he was silent, his pale pink skin darkening in the most comical way. “You insolent little…so what are you doing here?”
“I’m doing the maintenance.” Well, that was at least cousin to the truth. Now counterattack: “And what are you doing here?”
Brughel’s face got even darker. He pulled himself upward, his head ten centimeters above Qiwi’s. Now his feet floated on air, too. “Scum have no business questioning me.” He was carrying that silly steel baton. It was a plain metal dowel incised here and there with dark-stained dings. He braced himself with one hand and swung the baton through a glittering arc that splintered the sapling beside Qiwi’s head.