by Vernor Vinge
“But many of them are, Floria!”
Peres shook her head, and her voice rose. “Maybe. And maybe that’s the most terrible part of it. Emergents like Rita Liao and Jau Xin. Just folks, eh? And every day they use other human beings like less than animals, like—like machine parts. Even worse, that’s their living. Isn’t Liao a ‘programmer manager’ and Xin a ‘pilot manager’? The greatest evil in the universe, and they lap it up and then sit down with us in Benny’s parlor, and we accept them!” Her voice scaled up to just short of a shriek, and she was abruptly silent. She closed her eyes tight, and tears floated gently downward through the air.
Qiwi reached out to touch Floria’s hand, not knowing if the other might simply strike her. This was a pain she saw in various people. Some she could reach. Others, like Ezr Vinh, held it so rigidly secret that all she felt was a hint of hidden, pulsing rage.
Floria was silent, hunched over on herself. But after a moment she grasped Qiwi’s hand in both her own and bowed her head toward it, weeping. Her words were choked, almost unintelligible. “…don’t blame you…I really don’t. I know ’bout your father.” She gasped on silent sobs, and after a moment her words came more clearly. “I know you love this Tomas Nau. That’s okay. He couldn’t manage without you, but we’d probably all be dead then, too.”
Qiwi put her other arm around the woman’s shoulders. “But I don’t love him.” The words popped out, surprising her. And Floria looked up, surprised too.
“I mean, I respect him. He saved me when things were worst, after Jimmy killed my mother. But—” Strange to be talking to Floria like this, saying words that before she had said only inside herself. Tomas needed her. He was a good man raised in a terrible, evil system. The proof of his goodness was that he had come as far as he had, that he understood the evil and worked to end it. Qiwi doubted that she could have done as much; she would have been more like Rita and Jau, dumbly accepting, grateful to have evaded the net of Focus. Tomas Nau really wanted to change things. But love him? For all his humor, love, wisdom, there was a…remoteness…to Tomas. She hoped he never realized she felt that about him. And I hope subversive Floria has disabled Ritser’s bugs.
Qiwi pushed the thoughts away. For a moment she and Floria just stared at each other, surprised to see the other’s heart exposed. Hmm. She gave Floria a little pat on the shoulder. “I’ve known you for more than a year of shared Watch, and this is the first time there’s been any hint you felt this way…”
Floria released Qiwi’s hand, and wiped at the tears that still stood in her eyes. Her voice was almost under control. “Yeah. Before, I could always keep a lid on it. ‘Lie low,’ I told myself, ‘and be a proper little conquered Peddler.’ We’re naturally good at that, don’t you think? Maybe it comes from having the long view. But now…You know I had a sister in-fleet?”
“No.” I’m sorry. There had been so many Qeng Ho in the fleet before the fighting, and little Qiwi had known so few.
“Luan was a wild card, not too bright, but good with people…the sort a wise Fleet Captain throws in the mix.” A smile came close to surfacing, then drowned in bleak remembrance. “I have a doctorate in chemical engineering, but they Focused Luan and left me free. It should have been me, but they took her instead.”
Floria’s face twisted with guilt that should not have been. Maybe Floria was immune to permanent infection by the mindrot, like many of the Qeng Ho. Or maybe not. Tomas needed at least as many free as Focused, else the system would die the death of details. Qiwi opened her mouth to explain, but Floria wasn’t listening.
“I lived with that. And I kept track of Luan. They Focused her on their art. Watch-on-Watch, she and her gang carved out those friezes on Hammerfest. You probably saw her a hundred times.”
Yes, that is surely true. The carving gangs were the lowest of the Focused jobs. It wasn’t the high creation of Ali Lin or the translators. The patterns of the Emergent “legend art” left nothing to creativity. The workers beetled down the diamond corridors, centimeter by centimeter, scooping tiny bits from the walls according to the master pattern. Ritser’s original plan had been that the project burn up all the “waste human resources,” working them without medical care unto death.
“But they don’t work Watch-on-Watch anymore, Floria.” That had been one of Qiwi’s earliest triumphs over Ritser Brughel. The carving was made lighter work, and medical resources were made available to all who remained awake. The carvers would live through the Exile, to the manumissions that Tomas had promised.
Floria nodded. “Right, and even though our Watches were almost disjoint, I still kept track of Luan. I used to hang around the corridors, pretending to be passing through whenever other people came along. I even talked to her about that damn filthy art she loved; it was the only thing she could talk about, ‘The Defeat of the Frenkisch Orc’” Floria all but spat the title. Her anger faded, and she seemed to wilt. “Even so, I still could see her and maybe, if I was a good little Peddler, she would be free someday. But now…” She turned to look at Qiwi and her voice once more lost its steadiness. “…now she’s gone, not even on the roster. They claim her coffin failed. They claim she died in coldsleep. The lying, treacherous, bastards…”
Qeng Ho coldsleep boxes were so safe that the failure rate was a kind of statistical guess, at least under proper use and for spans of less than 4Gsec. Emergent equipment was flakier, and since the fighting, nobody’s gear was absolutely trustable. Luan’s death was most likely a terrible accident, just another echo of the madness that had nearly killed them all. And how can I convince poor Floria of this? “I guess we can’t be certain of anything we are told, Floria. The Emergents have an evil system. But…I was on one hundred percent Watch for a long time. I’m on fifty percent even now. I’ve been into almost everything. And you know, in all that time, I haven’t caught Tomas in a lie.”
“Okay,” grudgingly.
“And why would anyone want to kill Luan?”
“I didn’t say ‘kill.’ And maybe your Tomas doesn’t know. See, I wasn’t the only one who hung around the diamond carvers. Twice, I saw Ritser Brughel. Once he had all the women together, and was behind them, just watching. The other time…the other time it was just him and Luan.”
“Oh.” The word came out very small.
“I don’t have evidence. What I saw was nothing more than a gesture, a posture, a look on a man’s face. And so I was silent, and now Luan is gone.”
Floria’s paranoia suddenly seemed quite plausible. Ritser Brughel was a monster, a monster barely held in check by the Podmaster system. The memory of their confrontation had never left Qiwi, the slap slap slap of his steel baton in his hands as he raged at her. At the time, Qiwi had felt angry triumph at putting him down. Since, she’d realized how scared she should have been. Without Tomas, she surely would have died then…or worse. Ritser knew what would happen if he was caught.
Faking a death, even committing an unsanctioned execution, was tricky. The Podmasters had their own peculiar record-keeping requirements. Unless Ritser was very clever, there would be clues. “Listen, Floria. There are ways I can check on this. You could be right about Luan, but one way or another we’ll find out the truth. And if you’re right—well, there’s no way Tomas can put up with such abuse. He needs all the Qeng Ho cooperating, or none of us have a chance.”
Floria looked at her solemnly, then reached round to give her a fierce hug. Qiwi could feel the shivers that passed through her body, but she wasn’t crying. After a long moment, Floria said, “Thank you. Thank you. This last Msec, I’ve been so frightened…so ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“I love Luan, but Focus made her a stranger. I should have screamed bloody murder when I heard she was gone. Hell, I should have complained when I saw Brughel with her. But I was afraid for myself. Now…” Floria loosened her grip and regarded Qiwi with a shaky smile. “Now, maybe I’ve endangered someone else, too. But at least you have a chance…and you know, it’s possi
ble that she’s alive even now, Qiwi. If we can find her soon enough.”
Qiwi raised her palm. “Maybe, maybe. Let’s see what I can discover.”
“Yes.” They finished their tea, discussed everything Floria could remember about her sister and what she had seen. She was doing her best now to seem calm, but relief and nervousness made her words come a bit too fast, made her gestures a bit too broad.
Qiwi helped her set the bonsai bubble and its wood stand in brackets beneath the room’s main light. “I can get you lots more wood. Gonle really, really wants you to program for meta-crylates. You might want to panel your home with polished wood, like old-time captains did their inner cabins.”
Floria looked around her little space, and played along. “I could indeed. Tell her, maybe we can do a deal.”
And then Qiwi was standing at the lock’s inner door, and pulling down her coverall hood. For a moment, the fear was back in Floria’s face. “Be careful, Qiwi.”
“I will.”
Qiwi took her taxi through the rest of its stops, inspecting the rockpile, posting problems and changes to the ziphead net. Meantime, her mind raced down scary corridors. It was just as well she had this time to think. If Floria was right, then even with Tomas on her side, this could be very dangerous. Ritser was just into too many things. If he was sabotaging the coldsleep or falsifying death records, then big parts of Tomas’s net had been subverted.
Does Ritser suspect that I know? Qiwi glided down across the canyon that separated Diamond Three from Diamond Four. Arachna’s blue light shone from directly behind her, illuminating the caves that were the rough interface between the blocks. There was sublimation from some of the water glue. It was too fine to show on the sensor grid, but when she hovered with her face just centimeters from the surface she could see it. Even as she called in the problem, another part of her mind was turning on the deadlier question: Floria was clever enough to sweep her little cabin, even the outside. And Qiwi was very careful with her suit. Tomas had given her permission to disable all its bugs, both official and covert. On the net it was a different story. If Ritser was doing what Floria thought, then very likely he was monitoring even pod communications. It would be tricky to discover anything without tipping him off.
So be very, very careful. She needed an excuse for anything she did now. Ah. The personnel studies that she and Ezr had been assigned. Coasting up from her inspection of the rockpile, it would be reasonable for her to work on that. She put in a low-priority call to Ezr asking for a conference, then downloaded a large block of the Watch and personnel database. The records on Luan would be in there, but they were now cached locally, and her processors were covered by Tomas’s own security.
She brought up the bio on Luan Peres. Yes, reported dead in coldsleep. Qiwi flicker-read down through the text. There was lots of jargon, conjecture about how the unit had failed. Qiwi had had years to practice with coldsleep gear, if only as a front-end technician. She could more or less follow the discussion, though it seemed like the florid overkill of a rambling ziphead, what you might get if you asked a Focused person to invent a credible failure.
The taxi floated out of the rockpile’s shadow and the sunlight washed away the quiet blues of Arachna-light. The rockpile sunside was naked rock, graphite on diamond. Qiwi dimmed the view and turned back to the report on Luan. It was almost a clean report. It might have fooled her if she hadn’t been suspicious or if she hadn’t known all the requirements of Emergent doc. Where were the third and fourth crosschecks on the autopsy? Reynolt always wanted her zips to do that; the woman lost what little flexibility she had when it came to ziphead fatalities.
The report was bogus. Tomas would understand that the moment she pointed it out to him.
A chime sounded in her ear. “Ezr, hello.” Damn. Her call to him had just been a cover, an excuse to download a big block and look at Luan’s records. But here he was. For a moment, he seemed to be sitting next to her in the taxi. Then the image flickered as her huds figured out they couldn’t manage the illusion, and settled for putting him in a fixed position pseudo-display. Behind him were the blue-green walls of the Hammerfest attic. He was visiting Trixia, of course.
The picture was more than good enough to show the impatience in his face. “I decided to get right back to you. You know I go off-Watch in sixty Ksec.”
“Yes, sorry to bother you. I’ve been looking over the personnel stats. For that planning committee stuff you and I are stuck with? Anyway, I came up with a question.” Her mind raced ahead of her words, searching madly for some issue that would justify this call. Funny how the least attempt at deception always seemed to make life more complicated. She stumbled along for a few sentences, finally came up with a really stupid question about specialist mixing.
Ezr was looking at her a little strangely now. He shrugged. “You’re asking about the end of the Exile, Qiwi. Who knows what we’ll need when the Spiders are ready for contact. I thought we were going to bring all specialties out of coldsleep then, and run flat out.”
“Of course, that’s the plan, but there are details—” Qiwi weaseled her way toward credibility. The main thing was just to end the conversation. “—so I’ll think about this some more. Let’s have a real meeting after you get back on from coldsleep.”
Ezr grimaced. “That will be a while. I’m off for fifty Msec.” Most of two years.
“What?” That was more than four times as long as his usual off-Watch.
“You know, new faces and all that.” There were branches of his Watch tree that had not had much time. Tomas and the manager committee—Qiwi and Ezr included!—had thought everyone should get hands-on time and exposure to the usual training courses.
“You’re starting a little early.” And 50Msec was longer than she expected.
“Yeah. Well, you have to start someplace.” He looked away from the video pov. At Trixia? When he looked back, his tone was less impatient but somehow more urgent. “Look, Qiwi. I’m going to be on ice for a big fifty, and even afterwards I’ll be on a low duty cycle for a while.” He raised a hand as if to forestall objections. “I’m not complaining! I participated in the decisions myself…But Trixia will be on-Watch all that time. That’s longer than she has ever been alone. There’ll be nobody to stand up for her.”
Qiwi wished she could reach out and comfort him. “No one will harm her, Ezr.”
“Yeah, I know. She’s too valuable to harm. Just like your father.” Something flickered in his eyes, but it wasn’t the usual anger. Poor Ezr was begging her. “They’ll keep her body working, they’ll keep her moderately clean. But I don’t want her hassled any more than she already is. Keep an eye on her, Qiwi. You have real power, at least over small fish like Trud Silipan.”
It was the first time Ezr had really asked her for help.
“I’ll watch out for her, Ezr,” Qiwi said softly. “I promise.”
After he rang off, Qiwi sat unmoving for several seconds. Strange that a phone call that was an accident and a scam should have such an impact. But Ezr had always had that effect on her. When she was thirteen, Ezr Vinh had seemed the most wonderful man in the universe—and the only way she could get his attention was by goading him. Such teenage crushes should vape away, right? Occasionally she wondered if the Diem massacre had somehow stunted her soul, trapped her affections as they were in the last innocent days before all the death…Whatever the reason, it felt good that she could do something for him.
Maybe paranoia was contagious. Luan Peres dead. Now Ezr gone for even longer than they had planned. I wonder who actually specified that Watch change? Qiwi looked back through her cache. The schedule change was nominally from the Watch-manager committee…with Ritser Brughel doing the actual sign-off. That happened often enough; one Podmaster or the other had to sign for all such changes.
Qiwi’s taxi continued its slow coast upward. From this distance, the rockpile was a craggy jumble, Diamond Two in sunlight, the glare obscuring all but the brightest stars. It
might have been a wilderness scene except for the regular form of the Qeng Ho temp gleaming off to the side. With augmented vision, Qiwi could see the dozens of warehouses of the L1 system. Down in the shade of the rockpile were Hammerfest and the distillery, and the arsenal at L1-A. In the spaces around orbited the temp, the warehouses, the junked and semi-junked starships that had brought them all here. Qiwi used them as a kind of soft auxiliary to the electric jets. It was a well-tended dynamical system, even though it did look like chaos compared to the close mooring of the early Exile.
Qiwi took in the configuration with practiced eyes, even as her mind considered the much more treacherous problems of political intrigue. Ritser Brughel’s private domain, the old QHS Invisible Hand, was outward from the pile, less than two thousand meters from her taxi; she would pass less than fifteen hundred meters from its throat. Hmm. So, what if Ritser had kidnapped Luan Peres? That would be his boldest move ever against Tomas. And maybe it’s not the only thing. If Ritser could get away with this, there might be other deaths. Ezr.
Qiwi took a deep breath. Just take one problem at a time. So: Suppose Floria is right and Luan still lives, a toy in Ritser’s private space? There were limits to how fast Tomas could act against another Podmaster. If she complained, and there was any delay at all, Luan might die for real—and all the evidence could just…disappear.
Qiwi turned in her seat, got a naked-eye view of the Hand. She was less than seventeen hundred meters out now. It might be days before she could wangle a configuration this slick. The starship’s stubby form was so close that she could see the emergency repair welds, and the blistering where X-ray fire had struck the ramscoop’s projection flange. Qiwi knew the architecture of the Invisible Hand about as well as anyone at L1; she had lived on that ship through years of the voyage here, had used it as her hands-on example of every ship topic in her schooling. She knew its blind spots…More important, she had Podmaster-level access. It was just one of the many things that Tomas trusted her with. Until now she had never used it so, um, provocatively, but—