by Vernor Vinge
Pham was swept up, carried quickly forward. He had a brief vision of his brothers and sisters, young men and women with cold, hard faces. Today, one very small threat was being removed. The servants stopped briefly before Pham’s father the King. The old man—forty years old, actually—stared down at him briefly. Tran had always been a distant force of nature, capricious behind ranks of tutors and contesting heirs and courtiers. His lips were drawn down in a thin line. For an instant something like sympathy might have lived in the hard eyes. He touched the side of Pham’s face. “Be strong, boy. You bear my name.”
Tran turned, spoke pidgin words to the star man. And Pham was in alien hands.
Like Qiwi Lin Lisolet, Pham Nuwen had been cast out into the great darkness. And like Qiwi, Pham did not belong.
He remembered those first years more clearly than any other time in his life. No doubt the crew intended to pop him into cold storage and dump him at the next stop. What can you make of a kid who thinks there’s one world and it’s flat, who has spent his whole life learning to whack about with a sword?
Pham Nuwen had had his own agenda. The coldsleep coffins scared the devil out of him. The Reprise had scarcely left Canberra orbit when little Pham disappeared from his appointed cabin. He had always been small for his age, and by now he understood about remote surveillance. He kept the crew of the Reprise busy for more than four days searching for him. In the end, of course, Pham lost—and some very angry Qeng Ho dragged him before the ship’s master.
By now he knew that was the “handmaiden” he had seen in the fen. Even knowing, it was still hard to believe. One weak woman, commanding a starship and a crew of a thousand (though soon almost all of those were off-Watch, in coldsleep). Hmm. Maybe she had been the owner’s concubine, but had poisoned him and now ruled in his place. That was a credible scenario, but it made her an exceptionally dangerous person. In fact, Sura had been a junior captain, the leader of the faction that voted against staying at Canberra. Those who stayed called them “the cautious cowards.” And now they were heading home, into certain bankruptcy.
Pham remembered the look on her face when they finally caught him and brought him to the bridge. She had scowled down at the little prince, a boy still dressed in the velvet of Canberran nobility.
“You’ve delayed the start of the Watches, young fellow.”
The language was barely intelligible to Pham. The boy pushed down the panic and the loneliness and glared right back at her. “Madam. I am your hostage, not your slave, not your victim.”
“Damn, what did he say?” Sura Vinh looked around at her lieutenants. “Look, son. It’s a sixty-year flight. We’ve got to put you away.”
That last comment got through the language barrier, but it sounded too much like what the stable boss said when he was going to behead a horse. “No! You’ll not put me in a coffin.”
And Sura Vinh understood that, too.
One of the others spoke abruptly to Shipmaster Vinh. Probably something like “It doesn’t matter what he wants, ma’am.”
Pham tensed himself for another futile wrestling match. But Sura just stared at him for a second and then ordered everyone else out of her office. The two of them talked pidgin for some Ksecs. Pham knew court intrigue and strategy, and none of it seemed to apply here. Before they were done, the little boy was crying inconsolably and Sura had her arm across his shoulders. “It will be years,” she said. “You understand that?”
“…Y-yes.”
“You’ll arrive an old man if you don’t let us put you in coldsleep.” That last was still an unfortunate word.
“No, no, no! I’ll die first.” Pham Nuwen was beyond logic.
Sura was silent for a moment. Years later, she told Pham her side of the encounter: “Yeah, I could have heaved you in the freezer. It would have been prudent and ethical—and it would have saved me a world of problems. I will never understand why Deng’s fleet committee forced me to accept you; they were petty and pissed, but this was too much.
“So there you were, a little kid sold out by his own father. I’d be damned if I’d treat you the way he and the committee did. Besides, if you spent the flight on ice, you’d still be a zero when we got to Namqem, helpless in a tech civilization. So why not let you stay out of coldsleep and try to teach you the basics? I figured you’d see how long the years looked in a ship between the stars. In a few years, the coldsleep coffins might not seem quite so terrible to you.”
It hadn’t been simple. Ship security had to be reprogrammed for the presence of an irresponsible human. No uncrewed Tween Watches could be allowed. But the programming was done, and several of the Watch standers volunteered to extend their time out of coldsleep.
The Reprise reached ramcruise, 0.3 lightspeed, and sailed endlessly across the depths.
And Pham Nuwen had all the time in the universe. Several crewfolk—Sura for the first few Watches—did their best to tutor him. At first, he would have none of it…but the time stretched long. He learned to speak Sura’s language. He learned generalities about Qeng Ho.
“We trade between the stars,” said Sura. The two were sitting alone on the ramscoop’s bridge. The windows showed a symbolic map of the five star systems that the Qeng Ho circuited.
“Qeng Ho is an empire,” the boy said, looking out at the stars and trying to imagine how those territories compared with his father’s kingdom.
Sura laughed. “No, not an empire. No government can maintain itself across light-years. Hell, most governments don’t last more than a few centuries. Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.”
Little Pham Nuwen frowned. Even now, Sura’s words were sometimes nonsense. “No. It has to be an empire.”
Sura didn’t argue. A few days later, she went off-Watch, dead in one of the strange, cold coffins. Pham almost begged her not to kill herself, and for Msecs afterward he grieved on wounds he hadn’t imagined before. Now there were other strangers, and unending days of silence. Eventually he learned to read Nese.
And two years later, Sura returned from the dead. The boy still refused to go off-Watch, but from that point on he welcomed everything they wanted to teach him. He knew there was power beyond any Canberran lordship here, and now he understood that he might be master of it. In two years, he made up for what a child of civilization might learn in five. He had a competency in math; he could use the top- and second-level Qeng Ho program interfaces.
Sura looked almost the same as before her coldsleep, except that in some strange way, she seemed younger now. One day he caught her staring at him.
“So what’s the problem?” Pham asked.
Sura grinned. “I never saw a kid on a long flight. You’re what now, fifteen Canberra years old? Bret tells me you’ve learned a lot.”
“Yes. I’m going to be Qeng Ho.”
“Hmm.” She smiled, but it was not the patronizing, sympathy-filled smile that Pham remembered. She was truly pleased, and she didn’t disbelieve his claim. “You’ve got an awful lot to learn.”
“I’ve got an awful lot of time to do it.”
Sura Vinh stayed on Watch four straight years that time. Bret Trinli stayed for the first of those years, extending his own Watch. The three of them trekked through every accessible cubic meter of the Reprise: the sickbay and coffins, the control deck, the fuel tanks. The Reprise had burned almost two million tonnes of hydrogen to reach ramcruise speeds. In effect, she was a vast, nearly empty hulk now. “And without lots of support at the destination, this ship will never fly again.”
“You could refuel, even if there were only gas giants at the destination. Even I could manage the programs for that.”
“Yeah, and that’s what we did at Canberra. But without an overhaul, we can’t go far and we can’t do zip once we get there.” Sura paused, cursed under her breath. “Those damn fools. Why did they stay behind?” Sura seemed caught between her contempt for the shipmasters who had stayed to conquer Canberra, and her own guilt at having deserted them.
“I know—and we’re guaranteed to arrive at Namqem with nothing. Bet we’ll lose the Reprise.” She shook herself, visibly pushing back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. “Okay, in the meantime we’re going to create one more trained crewmember.” She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. “What specialty do we need the most, Bret?”
Trinli rolled his eyes. “You mean that can bring us the most income? Obviously: Programmer-Archeologist.”
The question was, could a feral child like Pham Nuwen ever become one? By now, the boy could use almost all the standard interfaces. He even thought of himself as a programmer, and potentially a ship’s master. With the standard interfaces, one could fly the Reprise, execute planetary orbit insertion, monitor the coldsleep coffins—
“And if anything goes wrong, you’re dead, dead, dead” was how Sura finished Pham’s litany of prowess. “Boy, you have to learn something. It’s something that children in civilization often are confused about, too. We’ve had computers and programs since the beginning of civilization, even before spaceflight. But there’s only so much they can do; they can’t think their way out of an unexpected jam or do anything really creative.”
“But—I know that’s not true. I play games with the machines. If I set the skill ratings high, I never win.”
“That’s just computers doing simple things, very fast. There is only one important way that computers are anything like wise. They contain thousands of years of programs, and can run most of them. In a sense, they remember every slick trick that Humankind has ever devised.”
Bret Trinli sniffed. “Along with all the nonsense.”
Sura shrugged. “Of course. Look. What’s our crew size—when we’re in-system and everybody is up?”
“One thousand and twenty-three,” said Pham. He had long since learned every physical characteristic of the Reprise and this voyage.
“Okay. Now, suppose you’re light-years from nowhere—”
Trinli: “You don’t have to suppose that, it’s the pure truth.”
“—and something goes wrong. It takes perhaps ten thousand human specialties to build a starship, and that’s on top of an enormous capital industry base. There’s no way a ship’s crew can know everything it takes to analyze a star’s spectrum, and make a vaccine against some wild change in the bactry, and understand every deficiency disease we may meet—”
“Yes!” said Pham. “That’s why we have the programs and the computers.”
“That’s why we can’t survive without them. Over thousands of years, the machine memories have been filled with programs that can help. But like Bret says, many of those programs are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs.” She paused, looked at Pham significantly. “It takes a smart and highly trained human being to look at what is available, to choose and modify the right programs, and then to interpret the results properly.”
Pham was silent for a moment, thinking back to all the times the machines had not done what he really wanted. It wasn’t always Pham’s fault. The programs that tried to translate Canberran to Nese were crap. “So…you want me to learn to program something better.”
Sura grinned, and there was a barely suppressed chuckle from Bret. “We’ll be satisfied if you become a good programmer, and then learn to use the stuff that already exists.”
Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”
“Almost precisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.”
“Yes, which I’ve almost completed.” She glanced at Pham, saw the look on his face. “Aha. I thought you’d rather die than use a coffin.”
Pham smiled shyly, remembering the little boy of six years before. “No, I’ll use it. Someday.”
That day was another five years of Pham’s lifetime away. They were busy years. Both Bret and Sura were off-Watch, and Pham never felt close to their replacements. The foursome played musical instruments—manually, just like minstrels at court! They’d do it for Ksecs on end; there seemed be some strange mental/social high they got from playing together. Pham was vaguely affected by music, but these people worked so hard for such ordinary results. Pham did not have the patience even to begin down that path. He drifted off. Being alone was something he was very good at. There was so much to learn.
The more he studied, the more he understood what Sura Vinh had meant about “mature programming environments.” By comparison with the crew members he knew, Pham had become an excellent programmer. “Flaming genius” was how he’d heard Sura describe him when she hadn’t known he was nearby. He could code anything—but life is short, and most significant systems were terribly large. So Pham learned to hack about with the leviathans of the past. He could interface weapons code from Eldritch Fae
rie with patched conic planners from before the conquest of space. Just as important, he knew how and where to look for possibly appropriate applications hidden in the ship’s network.
…And he learned something about mature programming environments that Sura had never quite said. When systems depended on underlying systems, and those depended on things still older…it became impossible to know all the systems could do. Deep in the interior of fleet automation there could be—there must be—a maze of trapdoors. Most of the authors were thousands of years dead, their hidden accesses probably lost forever. Other traps had been set by companies or governments that hoped to survive the passage of time. Sura and Bret and maybe a few of the others knew things about the Reprise’s systems that gave them special powers.
The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight. If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popular system…If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.
Eleven years had passed since a certain frightened thirteen-year-old had been taken from Canberra.
Sura had just returned from coldsleep. It was a return that Pham had awaited with increasing desire…since just after she departed. There was so much he wanted to tell her, so much to ask her and show her. Yet when the time finally came, he couldn’t bring himself to stay at the coldsleep hold and greet her.
She found him in an equipment bay on the aft hull, a tiny niche with a real window on the stars. It was a place that Pham had appropriated several years earlier.
There was tap on the light plastic cover. He slipped it aside.
“Hello, Pham.” Sura had a strange smile on her face. She looked strange. So young. In fact, she simply hadn’t aged. And now Pham Nuwen had lived twenty-four years. He waved her into the tiny room. She floated close past him, and turned. Her eyes were solemn above the smile. “You’ve grown up, friend.”