by Vernor Vinge
Nau nodded. “Right.” And the image of the Qeng Ho package was cut away, component layer by component layer. In the end, all that was left was a tiny blackened fleck, not more than a millimeter across.
Sitting next to him, Ezr caught an instant of tension in Tomas Nau. The other was suddenly, intensely interested. The moment passed before Ezr was even sure it existed. “My, that is small. Let’s take a closer look.”
The dustmote image swelled until it was a meter across and almost forty centimeters high. The head-up display automation painted appropriate reflections and shadows.
“Thanks.” Trinli stood so they could all see him over the top of the lens-shaped gadget. “This is the basic Qeng Ho localizer—normally embedded in protective barriers, and so on. But see, in a benign environment—even outside in the shade—it is quite self-sufficient.”
“Power?” said Reynolt.
Trinli waved his hand dismissively. “Just pulse them with microwaves, maybe a dozen times a second. I don’t know the details, but I’ve seen them used in much larger numbers on some projects. I’m sure that would give finer control. As for sensors, these puppies have several simple things built in—temperature, light levels, sonics.”
Jau Xin: “But how could Qiwi and the rest be ignorant of all this?”
Ezr could see where it was all going, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Trinli shrugged magnanimously. He still did not realize how far his ego had taken him. “As I’ve been saying all along: Qiwi Lin Lisolet is young and inexperienced. Coarse-grain localizers are good enough for most projects. Besides, the advanced characteristics are most useful in military work, and I wager that the texts she studies are deliberately vague on those issues. I, on the other hand, have worked as both an engineer and an armsman. Though it’s not permitted normally, the localizers are an excellent oversight facility.”
“Certainly,” Nau said, looking thoughtful. “Localizers and attached sensors are the heart of proper security.” And these dustmotes already had sensors and independence built in. They weren’t an embedded component of a system; they could be the system itself.
“What do you think, Qiwi? Would a slew of these make things simpler for you?”
“Maybe. This is all news to me; I never thought a tech book would lie to me.” She thought a moment. “But yes, if we had lots more localizers and the processing power scales properly fitted, then we could probably cut back on the human supervision.”
“Very well. I want you to get the details from Armsman Trinli, and install an extended network.”
“I’ll be glad to take over the job, Podmaster,” said Trinli.
But Nau was no fool. He shook his head. “No, you’re much more valuable in your overall supervisory role. In fact, I want you and Anne to chat about this. When he comes on-Watch, Ritser will be interested, too. There should be a number of public safety applications for these gadgets.”
So Pham Trinli had handed the Emergents even better manacles and chains. For an instant something like chagrined understanding flickered across the old man’s face.
Ezr did his best not to talk to anyone for the rest of the day. He had never imagined that he could hate a stupid clown so much. Pham Trinli was no mass murderer, and his devious nature was written large across his every foolish move. But his stupidity had betrayed a secret the enemy had never guessed, a secret that Ezr himself had never known, a secret that others must have taken to their deaths rather than give to Tomas Nau and Ritser Brughel.
Before, he had thought that Nau kept Trinli around for laughs. Now Ezr knew better. And not since that long-ago night in the temp park had Ezr felt so coldly murderous. If there ever came a time when Pham Trinli could have a fatal accident…
After second mess, Ezr stayed in his quarters. His behavior shouldn’t be suspicious. The live-music people took over Benny’s every day about this time, and jamming was one Qeng Ho custom that Ezr had never enjoyed, even as a listener. Besides, there was plenty of work to catch up on. Some of it didn’t even require that he talk to others. He slipped on the new head-up display, and looked at the Fleet Library.
In some sense, the survival of the Fleet Library was Captain Park’s greatest failure. Every fleet had elaborate precautions for destroying critical parts of their local library if capture was imminent. Such schemes couldn’t be complete. Libraries existed in a distributed form across the ships of their fleet. Pieces would be cached in a thousand nodes depending on the usage of the moment. Individual chips—those damnable localizers—contained extensive maintenance and operations manuals. Yet major databases should have been zeroed in very short order. What was left would have some usefulness, but the capital insights, the terabytes of hard experimental data would be gone—or left only as hardware instantiations, understandable only by painstaking reverse engineering. Somehow that destruction had not happened, even when it was obvious that the Emergent ambush would overwhelm all the ships of Park’s fleet. Or maybe Park had acted and there had been off-net nodes or backups that—contrary to all policy—had contained full copies of the library.
Tomas Nau knew a treasure when he saw it. Anne Reynolt’s slaves were dissecting the thing with the inhuman precision of the Focused. Sooner or later, they would know every Trader secret. But that would take years; zipheads didn’t know where to start. So Nau was using various unFocused staff to wander about the library and report on the big picture. Ezr had spent Msecs at it so far. It was a dicey job, because he had to produce some good results…and at the same time he tried subtly to guide their research away from things that might be immediately useful. He knew he might slip up, and eventually Nau would sense the lack of cooperation. The monster was subtle; more than once Ezr wondered who was using whom.
But today…Pham Trinli had just given away so much.
Ezr forced calmness on himself. Just look at the library. Write some silly report. That would count as duty time and he wouldn’t have to freak out in any visible way. He played with the hand control that came with the new, “sanitized” head-up display. At least it recognized the simpler command chords: the huds seamlessly replaced his natural vision of his cabin with a view of the library’s entry layer. As he looked around, the automation tracked his head motion and the images slid past almost as smoothly as if the documents were real objects floating in his room. But…he fiddled with the control. Damn. Almost no customization was possible. They had gutted the interface, or changed it to some Emergent standard. This wasn’t much better than ordinary wallpaper!
He reached up to pull the thing from his face, to crumple it. Calm down. He was still too ticked by Trinli’s screwup. Besides, this really was an improvement over wall displays. He smiled for a moment, remembering Gonle Fong’s obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards.
So what to look at today? Something that would seem natural to Nau, but couldn’t give them any more than they already had. Ah, yes, Trinli’s super localizers. They’d be sitting in an out-of-the-way niche in some secure section. He followed a couple of threads, the obvious directions. This was a view of the library that no mere apprentice would have. Nau had obtained—in ways that Ezr imagined, and still gave him nightmares—top-level passwords and security parameters. Now Ezr had the same view that Captain Park himself could have had.
No luck. The pointers showed the localizers clearly. Their small size was not really a secret, but even their incidentals manifest did not show them as carrying sensors. The on-chip manuals were just as innocent of strange features. Hunh. So Trinli was claiming there were trapdoors in the manuals that were invisible even in a captain’s view of the library?
The anger that had been churning his guts was momentarily forgotten. Ezr stared out at the data lands ranged around him, feeling suddenly relieved. Tomas Nau would see nothing strange in this situation. Except for Ezr Vinh, there might not be a single surviving Trader who would realize how absurd Trinli’s story must be.
But Ezr Vinh had grown up in the heart of a grea
t trading Family. As a child he had sat at the dinner table, listening to discussions of fleet strategies as they were really practiced. A Captain’s level of access to his fleet library did not normally admit of further hidden features. Things—as always—could be lost; legacy applications were often so old that the search engines couldn’t find relevance. But short of sabotage or a customizing, nonstandard Captain, there should be no isolated secrets. In the long run, such measures were simply too painful for the system maintainers.
Ezr would have laughed, except he suspected that these sanitized huds were reporting every sound he made back to Brughel’s zipheads. Yet this was the first happy thought of the day. Trinli was bullshitting us! The old fraud bluffed about a lot of things, but he was usually careful with Tomas Nau. When it came time to give Reynolt the details, Trinli would scrounge in the chip manuals…and come up empty-handed. Somehow Ezr couldn’t feel much sympathy for him; for once the old bastard would get what he deserved.
TWENTY-ONE
Qiwi Lin Lisolet spent a lot of time out-of-doors. Maybe with the localizer gimmick Old Trinli was promising, that would change. Qiwi floated low across the old Diamond One/Two contact edge. Now it was in sunlight, the volatiles of the earlier years moved or boiled away. Where it was undisturbed, the surface of the diamond was gray and dull and smooth, almost opalescent. The sunlight eventually burned the top millimeter or so into graphite, kind of a micro-regolith, disguising the glitter below. Every ten meters along the edge there was a rainbow glint, where a sensor was set. The ejet emplacements extended off on either side. Even this close, you could scarcely see the activity, but Qiwi knew her gear: the electric jets sputtered in millisecond bursts, guided by the programs that listened to her sensors. And even that wasn’t delicate enough. Qiwi spent more than two thirds of her duty time floating around the rockpile, adjusting the ejets—and still the rock quakes were dangerously large. With a finer sensor net and the programs that Trinli was claiming, it should be easy to design better firing regimes. Then there would be millions of quakes, but so small no one would notice. And then she wouldn’t have to be here so much of the time. Qiwi wondered what it would be like to be on a low-duty cycle Watch schedule like most people. It would save medical resources, but it would also leave poor Tomas even more alone.
Her mind slid around the worry. There are things you can cure and things you can’t; be grateful for what Trinli’s localizers will make right. She floated up from the cleft, and checked with the rest of her maintenance crew.
“Just the usual problems,” Floria Peres’s voice sounded in her ear. Floria was coasting over the “upper slopes” of Diamond Three. That was above the rockpile’s current zero-surface. They lost a few jets there every year. “Three loosened mountings…we caught them in time.”
“Very good. I’ll put Arn and Dima on it, I think we’re done early.” She smiled to herself. Plenty of time for the more interesting projects. She switched her comm away from her crew’s public sequency. “Hey, Floria. You’re in charge of the distillery this Watch, true?”
“Sure.” There was a chuckle in the other’s voice. “I try to get that job every time; working for you is just one of the unavoidable chores that come along with it.”
“Well, I have some things for you. Maybe we can deal?”
“Oh, maybe.” Floria was on a mere ten-percent duty cycle; even so, this was a dance they had been through before. Besides, she was Qeng Ho. “Meet me down at the distillery in a couple of thousand seconds. We can have tea.”
The volatiles distillery sat at the end of its slow trek across the dark side of the rockpile. Its towers and retorts glistened with frost in the Arachna-light; in other places, it glowed with dull red heat where fractionation and recombination occurred. What came out was the simple stock materials for their factory and the organic sludges for the bactries. The core of the L1 distillery was from the Qeng Ho fleet. The Emergents had brought along similar equipment, but it had been lost in the fighting. Thank goodness it was ours that survived. The repairs and new construction had forced them to scavenge from all the ships. If the distillery core had been Emergent technology, they’d’ve been lucky to have anything working now.
Qiwi tied down her taxi a few meters from the distillery. She unloaded her thermal-wrapped cargo, and pulled herself along the guide ropes toward the entrance. Around her lay the sweeping drifts of their remaining hoard of volatiles: airsnow and ocean ice from the surface of Arachna. Those had come a long way, and cost a lot. Much of the original mass, especially the airsnow, had been lost in the Relight and chance illuminations since. The remainder had been pushed and balanced into the safest shadows, had been melted in a vain attempt to glue the rockpile together, had been used to breathe and eat and live. Tomas had plans to hollow out portions of Diamond One as a really secure capture cave. Maybe that wouldn’t be necessary. As the sun slowly dimmed, it should be easier to save what was left. Meantime, the distillery made its slow progress—less than ten meters per year—through the drifts of ice and air. Behind, it left starglint on raw diamond, and a track of anchor holes.
Floria’s control cubby was at the base of the distillery’s rearmost towers. As part of the original Qeng Ho module, it had been nothing more than a pressurized hutch to eat and nap in. Over the years of the Exile, its various occupants had added to it. Coming in on it from ground level…Qiwi paused a moment. Most of her life was spent either in close-in rooms and tunnels, or in open emptiness. Floria’s latest changes made this something in between. She could imagine what Ezr would say of this: It really did look like a little cabin, almost like the fairy-tale pictures of how a farmer might live in the snow-covered foothills of an ancient land, close to a glistening forest.
Qiwi climbed past the outriggers and anchor cables—the edge of the magic forest—and knocked on the cabin door.
Trading was always fun. She had tried so many times to explain that to Tomas. The poor fellow had a good heart, but he came from a culture that just could not understand.
Qiwi brought partial payment for Floria’s most recent output: Inside the thermal wrap was a twenty-centimeter bonsai, something Papa had worked Msecs to build. Micro-dwarf ferns grew out into multiple canopies. Floria held the bonsai bubble close to the room’s overhead light and looked up through the green. “The midges!”—submillimeter bugs. “They have colored wings!”
Qiwi had followed her friend’s reaction with carefully pretended neutrality, but now she couldn’t help herself, and she laughed. “I wondered if you would notice.” The bonsai was smaller than Papa’s usual, but it might be the most beautiful yet, better than anything Qiwi had ever seen in the library. She reached into the thermal wrap and brought out the other part of the payment. “And this is from Gonle, personally. It’s a clasp stand for the bonsai.”
“It’s…wood.” Floria had been charmed by the bonsai. Her reaction to the wood plate was more like amazement. She reached out to slide her fingers across the polished grain.
“We can make it by the tonne lot now, kind of a reverse dry rot. Of course, since Gonle grows it in vats, it looks a little strange.” The stripes and whorls were biowaves caught in the grain of the wood. “We’d need more space and time to get real rings.” Or maybe not; Papa thought he might be able to trick the biowaves into faking growth rings.
“Doesn’t matter.” Floria’s voice was abstracted. “Gonle has won her bet…or your father has won it for her. Imagine. Real wood in quantity, not just twigs in a bonsai bubble, or brush in the temp’s park.” She looked at Qiwi’s grinning face. “And I bet she figures this more than pays for past deals.”
“Well…we hoped it would soften you up.” They sat down, and Floria brought out the tea she had promised, from Gonle Fong’s agris and before that from the mounds of volatiles and diamond that surrounded the distillery. The two of them worked through the list that Benny and Gonle had put together. The list was not just their orders, but the result of the brokering that went on day after day up in Benny�
��s parlor. There were items here that were mainly for Emergent use. Lord, there were items in here that Tomas could have simply demanded, and that Ritser Brughel would certainly have demanded.
Floria’s objections were a catalogue of technical problems, things she would need before she could undertake what was asked of the distillery. She would get all she could out of these deals, but in fact what was being asked of her was technically difficult. Once, in pre-Flight when Qiwi couldn’t have been more than seven years old, Papa had taken her to a distillery at Triland. “This is what feeds the bactries, Qiwi, just as the bactries support the parks. Each layer is more wonderful than the one below it, but making even the lowliest distillery is a kind of art.” Ali loved his high end of the job above all others, but he still respected those others. Floria Peres was a talented chemist, and the dead goo she made was a marvelous creation.
Four thousand seconds later, they had agreed on a web of perks and favors for the rest of Floria’s Watch. They sat for a time, sipping a new batch of tea and idly discussing what they might try after the current goals were accomplished. Qiwi told her Trinli’s claims about the localizers.
“That’s good news, if the old fart isn’t lying. Maybe now you won’t have to live at such a high duty cycle.” Floria looked across at Qiwi, and there was a strange, sad expression in her eyes. “You were a little girl, and now you’re older than I am. You shouldn’t have to burn your life out, child, just to keep a bunch of rocks lined up.”
“It—It’s not that bad. It needs to be done, even if we don’t have the best medical support.” Besides, Tomas is always on Watch and he needs my help. “And there are advantages to being up most of the time. I get into almost everything. I know where there are deals to be made, goodies to be scrounged. It makes me a better Trader.”
“Hmm.” Floria looked away, and then abruptly back. “This isn’t trading! It’s a silly game!” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry, Qiwi. You can’t really know…but I know what trade is really like. I’ve been to Kielle. I’ve been to Canberra. This,” she waved her hand, as if to encompass all of L1—“this is just pretend. You know why I always ask for this distillery job? I’ve made this control cubby into something like a home, where I can pretend. I can pretend I’m alone and far away. I don’t have to live in the temp with Emergents who pretend they are decent human beings.”