by Vernor Vinge
Pham started to shake his head. “Yes. But I—you are still ahead of me.”
“Maybe. In some ways. But you’re twice the programmer I will ever be. I saw the solutions you worked out for Ceng this last Watch.”
They sat, and she asked him about Ceng’s problems and his solutions. All the glib speeches and bravado he’d spent the last year planning were swept from his mind, his conversation reduced to awkward starts and stops. Sura didn’t seem to notice. Damn. How does a Qeng Ho man take a woman? On Canberra, he had grown up believing in chivalry and sacrifice…and had gradually learned that the true method was very different: a gentleman simply grabbed what he wanted, assuming a more powerful gentleman did not already own it. Pham’s own personal experience was limited and surely untypical: poor Cindi had grabbed him. At the beginning of the last Watch, he had tried the true Canberra method on one of the female crew. Xina Rao had broken his wrist and made a formal complaint. It was something Sura would surely hear about sooner or later.
The thought blew away Pham’s tenuous hold on the conversation. He stared at Sura in embarrassed silence, then blurted out the announcement he had been holding secret for some special moment. “I…I’m going to go off-Watch, Sura. I’ll finally start coldsleep.”
She nodded solemnly, as if she had never guessed.
“You know what really did it for me, Sura? The dustmote that broke me? It was three years ago. You were off-Watch,” and I realized how long it would be until next I saw you. “I was trying to make that second-level celestial mech stuff work. You really have to understand some math to do that. For a while, I was stumped. For the hell of it, I moved up here, just started staring at the sky. I’ve done that before. Every year, my sun is dimmer; it’s scary.”
“I’ll bet,” said Sura, “but I didn’t know you could see directly aft, even from here.” She slid near the forty-centimeter port, and killed the lights.
“Yes you can,” said Pham, “at least when your eyes adjust.” The room was dark as pitch now. This was a real window, not some enhancing display device. He moved close behind her. “See, there’s the four bright stars of the Pikeman. Now Canberra’s star just makes his pole one tong longer.” Silly. She doesn’t know the Canberran sky. He babbled on, a mindless cover for what he was feeling. “But even that is not what got me; my sun is another star, so what? The thing is, the constellations: the Pikeman, the Wild Goose, the Plow. I can still recognize them, but even their shapes have changed. I know, I should have expected that. I’d been doing the math behind much harder things. But…it struck me. In eleven years, we have moved so far that the whole sky has changed. It gave me a gut feeling of how far we’ve come, how very far we still have to go.”
He gestured in the dark, and his palm slapped lightly on the smooth swell of her rear. His voice died in a little squeak, and for a measurable instant his hand sat motionless on her pants, his fingers touching her bare flesh just above the hip line. Somehow he hadn’t noticed before; her blouse wasn’t even tucked in. His hand swept around her waist and upward across the smooth curve of her belly, kept moving till he touched the undersides of her breasts. The move was a grab, modified and tentative perhaps, but a definite grab.
Sura’s reaction was almost as swift as Xina Rao’s had been. She twisted beneath him, her breast centering in the palm of his other hand. Before Pham could get out of her way, her arm was behind his neck, levering him down…for a long, hard kiss. He felt multiple shocks where his lips touched hers, where his hand rested, where her leg slid up between his.
And now she was pulling his shirt from his pants, forcing their bodies into a single long touch. She leaned her head back from his lips and laughed softly. “Lord! I’ve been wanting to get my hands on you ever since you were fifteen years old.”
But why didn’t you? I was in your power. It was the last coherent thought he had for some time. In the dark, there loomed more wonderful questions. How to get leverage, how to join the smooth endpoints of softness and hard. They bounced randomly from wall to wall, and poor Pham might never have found his way if not for his partner and guide.
Afterward she brought up the lights, and showed him how to do it in his sleeping hammock. And then again, with the lights out once more. After a long while, they floated exhausted in the dark. Peace and joy, and his arms were so full with her. Starlight was a magical faintness, that after enough time seemed almost bright. Bright enough to glint on Sura’s eyes, to show the white of her teeth. She was smiling. “You’re right about the stars,” she said. “It is a bit humbling to see the sweep of the stars, to know how little we count.”
Pham squeezed her gently, but was for the moment so satisfied he could actually think about what she said. “…Yes, it’s scary. But at the same time, I look out and realize that with starships and coldsleep, we are outside and beyond them. We can make what we want of the universe.”
The white of Sura’s smile broadened. “Ah, Pham, maybe you haven’t changed. I remember the first days of little Pham, when you could barely spit out an intelligible sentence. You kept insisting the Qeng Ho was an empire, and I kept saying we were simply traders, could never be anything more.”
“I remember, but still I don’t understand. Qeng Ho has been around for how long?”
“That name for ‘trading fleet’? Maybe two thousand years.”
“That’s longer than most empires.”
“Sure, and part of the reason is, we’re not an empire. It’s our function that makes us seem everlasting. The Qeng Ho of two thousand years ago had a different language, had no common culture with now. I’m sure that things like it exist off and on through all Human Space. It’s a process, not a government.”
“Just a bunch of guys who happen to be doing similar things?”
“You got it.”
Pham was silent for a while. She just didn’t understand. “Okay. That is the way things are now. But don’t you see the power that this gives you? You hold a high technology across hundreds of light-years of space and thousands of years of time.”
“No. That’s like saying the sea surf could rule a world: It’s everywhere, it’s powerful, and it seems to be coordinated.”
“You could have a network, like the fleet network you used at Canberra.”
“Lightspeed, Pham, remember? Nothing goes faster. I’ve no idea what traders are doing on the other side of Human Space—and at best that information would be centuries out of date. The most you’ve seen is networking across the Reprise; you’ve studied how a small fleet network is run. I doubt you can imagine the sort of net it takes to support a planetary civilization. You’ll see at Namqem. Every time we visit a place like that, we lose some crew. Life with a planetary network, where you can interact with millions of people with millisecond latencies—that is something you are still blind to. I’ll bet when we get to Namqem, you’ll leave, too.”
“I’ll never—”
But Sura was turning in his embrace, her breasts sliding across his chest, her hand sweeping down his belly, reaching. Pham’s denial was lost in his body’s electric response.
After that, Pham moved into Sura’s cruise quarters. They spent so much time together that the other Watch standers teased him for “kidnapping our captain.” In fact, the time with Sura Vinh was unending joy to Pham, but it was not just lust fulfilled. They talked and talked and argued and argued…and set the course of the rest of their lives.
And sometimes he thought of Cindi. Both she and Sura had come after him, lifting him to new awareness. They had both taught him things, argued with him, and bedeviled him. But they were as different as summer from winter, as different as a pond from an ocean. Cindi had stood up for him at the risk of her life, stood alone against all the King’s men. In his wildest dreams, Pham could not imagine Sura Vinh committing her life against such odds. No, Sura was infinitely thoughtful and cautious. It was she who had analyzed the risks of remaining at Canberra, and concluded that success was unlikely—and persuaded enough others about
those risks to wangle a ship from the fleet committee and escape Canberra space. Sura Vinh planned for the long haul, saw problems where no one else could see. She avoided risks—or confronted them with overwhelming force of her own. In Pham’s confused moral pantheon, she was much less than Cindi…and much more.
Sura never bought his notion of a Qeng Ho star kingdom. But she didn’t simply deny him; she showered him with books, with economics and histories that had eluded his decade-long reading schedule. A reasonable person would have accepted her point; there had been so many “common sense” things that Pham Nuwen had been wrong about before. But Pham still had his old stubbornness. Maybe it was Sura who wore blinders. “We could build an interstellar net. It would just be…slow.”
Sura laughed. “Yeah! Slow. Like a three-way handshake would take a thousand years!”
“Well, obviously the protocols would be different. And the usage, too. But it could change the random trading function into something much more, ah, profitable.” He had almost said powerful, but he knew that would just get him zinged about his “medieval” mind-set. “We could keep a floating database of Customers.”
Sura shook her head, “But out of date by decades to millennia.”
“We could maintain human language standards. Our network programming standards would outlive any Customer government. Our trading culture could last forever.”
“But Qeng Ho is just one fish in a random sea of traders…Oh.” Pham could see that he was finally getting through. “So the ‘culture’ of our broadcasts would give participants a trading edge. So there would be a reinforcement effect.”
“Yes, yes! And we could crypto-partition the broadcasts to protect against nearby competition.” Pham smiled slyly. The next point was something that little Pham, and probably Pham’s father the King of all Northland, could never have conceived. “In fact, we could even have some broadcasts in the clear. The language standards material, for instance, and the low end of our tech libraries. I’ve been reading the Customer histories. All the way back to Old Earth, the only constant is the churn, the rise of civilization, the fall, as often as not the local extinction of Humankind. Over time, Qeng Ho broadcasts could damp those swings.”
Sura was nodding, a far look settling into her eyes. “Yes. If we did it right, we’d end up with Customer cultures that spoke our language, were molded to our trading needs, and used our programming environment—” Her gaze snapped up to his face. “You still have empire on the brain, don’t you?”
Pham just smiled.
Sura had a million objections, but she had caught the spirit of the idea, recast it into her experience, and now her entire imagination was working alongside his. As the days passed, her objections became more like suggestions, and their arguments more a kind of wondrous scheming.
“You’re crazy, Pham…but that doesn’t matter. Maybe it takes a crazy medievalist to be so ambitious. It’s like…it’s like we’re creating a civilization out of whole cloth. We can set up our own myths, our own conventions. We’ll be in at the ground floor of everything.”
“And we’ll outlast any competition.”
“Lord,” Sura said softly. (It would be some time before they invented the “Lord of All Trade” and the pantheon of lesser gods.) “And you know, Namqem is the ideal place to start. They’re about as advanced as a civilization can ever get, but they’re getting a little cynical and decadent. They have propaganda techs as good as any in human histories. What you’re suggesting is strange, but it’s trivial compared to ad campaigns on a planetary net. If my cousins are still in Namqem space, I bet they’d bankroll the operation.” She laughed, joyous and almost childlike, and Pham realized how badly the fear of bankruptcy and disgrace had bent her down. “Hell, we’re gonna turn a profit!”
The rest of their Watch was a nonstop orgy of imagination and invention and lust. Pham came up with a combination of beamed and broadcast interstellar radio, schedules that could keep fleets and families in synch across centuries. Sura accepted most of the protocol design, wonder and obvious delight in her eyes. As for the human engineering, Pham’s scheme of hereditary lords and military fleets—Sura laughed at those, and Pham did not argue the judgment. After all, in people-things he was still scarcely more than a thirteen-year-old medieval.
In fact, Sura Vinh was far more awed than patronizing. Pham remembered their last conversation before he took his first turn in a coldsleep coffin. Sura had been calibrating the radiative coolers, checking the hypothermia drugs. “We’ll come out almost together, Pham, me a hundred Ksec before you. I’ll be here to help.” She smiled and he could feel her gaze gently searching in him. “Don’t worry.”
Pham made some flippant remark, but of course she saw the uneasiness in him. She spoke of other things as he slipped into the coffin, a running monologue of their plans and daydreams, what they would begin when they finally reached Namqem. And then it was time, and she hesitated. She leaned down and kissed him lightly on the lips. Her smile turned faintly teasing, but she was mocking herself as much as him: “Sleep well, sweet prince.”
And then she was gone, and the drugs were taking effect. It didn’t feel cold at all. His last thoughts were a strange floating back across his past. During Pham’s childhood on Canberra, his father had been a faraway figure. His own brothers had been lethal threats to his existence. Cindi, he had lost Cindi before he ever really understood. But for Sura Vinh…he had the feeling of a grown child for a loving parent, the feeling of a man for his woman, the feeling of a human being for a dear friend.
In some fundamental sense, Sura Vinh had been all those things. For much of her long life, Sura Vinh had seemed to be his friend. And even though she was ultimately his betrayer—still, there at the beginning, Sura Vinh had been a woman good and true.
Someone was shaking him gently, waving a hand in his face. “Hey, Trinli! Pham! Are you still with us?” It was Jau Xin, and he looked genuinely concerned.
“Ungh, yes, yes. I’m fine.”
“You sure?” Xin watched him for several seconds, then drifted back to his seat. “I had an uncle who went all glassy-eyed like you just did. Tas a stroke, and he—”
“Yeah, well I’m fine. Never better.” Pham put the bluster back in his voice. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”
The claim provoked diversionary laughter all round the table. “Thinking. A bad habit, Pham, old boy!” After a few moments, their concern faded. Pham listened attentively now, occasionally injecting loud opinions.
In fact, invasive daydreaming had been a feature of his personality since at least his leaving the Canberra. He’d get totally wrapped up in memories or planning, and lose himself the way some people did in immersion videos. He’d screwed up at least one deal because of it. From the corner of his eye, he could see that Qiwi was gone. Yes, the girl’s childhood had been much like his, and maybe that accounted for her imagination and drive now. In fact, he had often wondered if the Strentmannians’ crazy childrearing was based on stories of Pham’s time on the Reprise. At least when he had reached his destination, things got better. Poor Qiwi had found only death and deception here. But she still kept going…
“We’re getting good translations now.” Trud Silipan was back on the Spiders. “I’m in charge of Reynolt’s translator zipheads.” Trud was more like an attendant than a manager, but no one pointed that out. “I tell you, any day now we’ll start getting information about what the Spiders’ original civilization was like.”
“I don’t know, Trud. Everyone says this must be a fallen colony. But if the Spiders are elsewhere in space, how come we don’t hear their radio?”
Pham: “Look. We’ve been over this before. Arachna must be a colony world. This system is just too hostile for life to start naturally.”
And someone else: “Maybe the creatures don’t have a Qeng Ho.” Chuckles went round the table.
“No, there’d still be plenty of radio noise. We’d hear them.”
“Maybe the rest of them a
re really far away, like the Perseus Mumbling—”
“Or maybe they’re so advanced they don’t use radio. We only noticed these guys because they’re starting over.” It was an old, old argument, part of a mystery that extended back to the Age of Failed Dreams. More than anything else it was what had drawn the human expeditions to Arachna. It was certainly what had drawn Pham.
And indeed, Pham had already found Something New, something so powerful that the origin of the Spiders was now a peripheral issue for him. Pham had found Focus. With Focus, the Emergents could convert their brightest people into dedicated machines of thought. A dud like Trud Silipan could get effective translations at the touch of a key. A monster like Tomas Nau could have eyes unresting. Focus gave the Emergents a power that no one had ever had before, subtlety that surpassed any machine and patience that surpassed any human. That was one of the Failed Dreams—but they had achieved it.
Watching Silipan pontificate, Pham realized that the next stage in his plan had finally arrived. The low-level Emergents had accepted Pham Trinli. Nau tolerated, even humored him, thinking he might be an unknowing window on the Qeng Ho military mind. It was time to learn a lot more about Focus. Learn from Silipan, from Reynolt…someday learn the technical side of the thing.
Pham had tried to build a true civilization across all of Human Space. For a few brief centuries it had seemed he might succeed. In the end, he had been betrayed. But Pham had long ago realized that the betrayal had been just the overt failure. What Sura and the others did to him at Brisgo Gap had been inevitable. An interstellar empire covers so much space, so much time. The goodness and justice of such a thing is not enough. You need an edge.
Pham Nuwen raised his bulb of Diamonds and Ice and drank an unnoticed toast, to the lessons of the past and the promise of the future. This time he would do things right.