by Vernor Vinge
His hosts—a group of local companies—put him up at their expense. He spent his official time trying to learn more of their language and trying to discover something his fleet had brought that might be worth something to his customers. They were trying just as hard. It was something like industrial espionage in reverse. The locals’ electronics was a little better than Pham had ever seen, though there were program improvements the Qeng Ho might suggest. Their medical automation was significantly backward; that would be his foot in the door, a place to haggle from.
Pham and his staff categorized all the things they might bring from this encounter. It would pay for the voyage and more. But Pham heard rumors. His hosts represented a number of—“cartels” was the nearest translation that Pham could make of the word. They hid things from one another. The rumor was of a new type of localizer, smaller than any made elsewhere, and needing no internal power supply. Any improvement in localizers was a profitable item; the gadgets were the positional glue that made embedded systems so powerful. But these “super” localizers were alleged to contain sensors and effectors. If it was anything more than rumor, it would have political and military consequences on Ytre itself—destabilizing consequences.
By now, Pham Nuwen knew how to collect information in a technical society, even one where he wasn’t a fluent speaker, even one where he was being watched. In four weeks he knew which cartel might have the maybe-existent invention. He knew the name of its magnate: Gunnar Larson. The Larson cartel had not mentioned the invention in their trading negotiations. It was not on the table—and Pham didn’t want to hint about it when others were present. He arranged a face-to-face meeting with Larson. It was the sort of thing that would have made sense even to Pham’s aunts and uncles back on medieval Canberra, though the technical subterfuge behind the meeting would have been unintelligible to them.
Six weeks after his landfall on Ytre, Pham Nuwen walked alone through the most exclusive open street in Dirby. Scattered clouds were reminders of the recent rain. They showed pink and gray in the bright twilight. The sun had just set in the deep heart of Trygve. Near the limb of the giant planet, an arch of gold and red was the memory of the sun’s passing into eclipse. The disk of the giant stood across ten degrees of sky. Silent blue lightning flickered in its polar latitudes.
The air was cool and moist, the breeze carrying some natural perfume. Pham kept up his pace, pulling the leash tight every time his snarlihunds wanted to investigate something off the promenade. His cover demanded that he take things slowly, enjoy the view, wave in a courtly way to the similarly dressed people who passed by. After all, what else would a rich, retired resident be doing out in the open but admiring the lights and showing off his hunds? That’s what his contact had claimed anyway. “Security on Huskestrade isn’t really tight. But if you don’t have an excuse to be there, the police may stop you. Take some prize snarlihunds. That’s legitimate reason to be on the promenade.”
Pham’s gaze took in the palaces that showed here and there through the foliage along the promenade. Dirby seemed like a peaceful place. There was security here…but if enough people wanted to pull things down, it could be done in a single night of fire and riot. The cartels played a hard commercial game, but their civilization was coasting through the highest, happiest of its good times…Maybe “cartels” wasn’t even the right word. Gunnar Larson and some of the other magnates put on airs of deep, ancient wisdom. Larson was a boss man all right, but the word for his rank meant something more than that. Pham knew the term “philosopher king.” But Larson was a businessman. Maybe his title meant “philosopher-magnate.” Hmm.
Pham reached the Larson estate. He turned down a private offway that was almost as broad as the promenade. The output of his head-up display faded; after a few more paces, he had only a natural view. Pham was annoyed but not surprised. He walked on as if he owned the place, even let the hunds take a crap behind a two-meter stand of flowers. Let the philosopher-magnate understand my deep respect for all the mystery.
“Please follow, sir.” A voice came quietly from behind him. Pham suppressed a start, turned and nodded casually to the speaker. In the reddish twilight he couldn’t see any weapons. High in the sky and two million kilometers away, a chain of blue lightning flickered bright on the face of Trygve. He got a good look at his guide, and three others who had been hidden by the dark. They wore corporate robes, but he couldn’t miss the military bearing, or the huds they wore across their eyes.
He let them take the hunds. That was just as well. The four creatures were big and carnivore-looking mean. They might be overbred into gentleness, but it would take more than one twilight walk to make Pham a hund lover.
Pham and the remaining guards walked more than one hundred meters. He had a glimpse of delicately turned branches, moss that sat just so at joints of the roots. The higher the social position, the more these fellows went for rustic nature—and the more perfect every detail had to be. No doubt this “forest path” had been manicured for a century to capture untrammeled wildness.
The path opened onto a hillside garden, sitting above a stream and a pond. The reddish arch of Trygve was enough for him to make out the tables, the small human form that rose to greet him.
“Magnate Larson.” Pham gave the little half bow he had seen between equals. Larson reciprocated, and somehow Pham knew the other fellow was grinning.
“Fleet Captain Nuwen…Please take a seat.”
There were cultures where trade couldn’t begin until everyone is bored unto death by irrelevant chitchat. Pham wasn’t expecting that here. He was due back in his hotel in 20Ksec—and it would be well for both of them if the other cartelists didn’t realize where Pham had been. Yet Gunnar Larson seemed in no hurry. Occasional Trygve lightning showed him: typical Ytre stock, but very old, the blondish hair thinning, the pale pink skin wrinkled. They sat in the flashing twilight for more than 2Ksec. The old man chatting about Pham’s history and the past of Trygve Ytre. Hell, maybe he’s getting back at me for dumping in his flowers. Or maybe it was something Ytreisch inscrutable. On the bright side, the fellow spoke excellent Aminese and Pham wasn’t backward in that language either.
Larson’s estate was strangely quiet. Dirby city contained almost a million people, and though none of the buildings were monstrously tall, there was urbanization to within a thousand meters of the high-class Huskestrade section. Yet sitting here, the loudest sounds were Gunnar Larson’s inane chitchat—and the splashing of the little waterfall just down the hillside. Pham’s eyes were well adjusted now. He could see the reflection of Trygve’s arching light in the pond. He could see ripples when some large, shelled creature breached the surface. I’m actually coming to like the cycle of light on Ytre. Three weeks ago Pham would have never thought that time could come. The nights and days were long beyond any rhythm Pham could sustain, but the midday eclipses gave some respite. And after a while you began to forget that almost every color was a shade of red. There was a comfortable safeness about this world; these people had kept a prosperous peace for almost a thousand years. So maybe there was wisdom here…
Abruptly, without breaking the cadence of triviality, Larson said, “So you think to learn the secret of Larson localizers?”
Pham knew his startled expression didn’t go beyond his eyes.
“First I would like to learn if such things exist. The rumors are very spectacular…and very vague.”
The old man’s teeth glinted in a smile. “Oh, they exist.” He gestured around them. “They give me eyes everywhere. They make this darkness into day.”
“I see.” The old man wasn’t wearing a head-up. Could he guess at the sardonic expression on Pham’s face?
Larson laughed softly. “Oh yes.” He touched his temple just behind the orbit of his eye. “There’s one resting right here. The others align on it and precisely stimulate my optic nerve. It takes a lot of practice on both sides. But if you have enough Larson localizers, they can handle the load. They can synthesize
views from whatever direction I choose.” He made an obscure motion with his hands. “Your facial expressions are as clear as day to me, Pham Nuwen. And from the localizers that have dusted your hands and neck, I can even look inside. I can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe. With a little concentration”—he cocked his head—“I can estimate blood flow within regions of your brain…You are sincerely surprised, young man.”
Pham’s lips tightened in anger at himself. The other had spent more than a Ksec calibrating him. If this had been in an office, away from this garden and this quiet darkness, he would have been much more on his guard. Pham shrugged. “Your localizers are far and away the most interesting thing about the current stage of Ytreisch civilization. I’m very interested in acquiring some samples—even more interested in the program base, and the factory specification.”
“To what end?”
“That should be obvious and irrelevant. The important thing is what I can give you in trade. Your medical science is poorer than at Namqem or Kielle.”
Larson seemed to nod. “It’s worse than we had here before the Fall. We’ve never recovered all the old secrets.”
“You called me ‘young man,’” said Pham, “but what is your own age, sir? Ninety? One hundred?” Pham and his staff had looked carefully at the Ytreisch net, gauging the locals’ medical science.
“Ninety-one of your thirty-Msec years,” said Larson.
“Well, sir, I have lived a hundred and twenty-seven years. That doesn’t count coldsleep, of course.” And I look like a young man.
Larson was silent for a long moment, and Pham was sure that he had scored a point. Maybe these “philosopher-magnates” weren’t so inscrutable.
“Yes, I would like to be young again. And millions would spend millions for the same. What can your medicine give?”
“A century or two, looking about as you see me. Two or three centuries after that, visibly aging.”
“Ah. That’s even a bit better than we achieved before the Fall. But the very old will look as bad and suffer as much as the old always have. There are intrinsic limits to how far the human body can be pushed.”
Pham was politely silent, but he smiled inside. Medicine was the hook, all right. Pham would get their localizers in return for decent medical science. Both sides would benefit enormously. Magnate Larson would live a few extra centuries. If he was lucky, the current cycle of his civilization would outlive him. But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did—a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers.
Larson was making a strange, soft sound. After a moment, Pham realized it was coughing laughter. “Ah, forgive me. You may be a hundred and twenty-seven years old, but you are still a young man in your mind. You hide behind the dark and an expressionless face—don’t be offended. You haven’t trained at the right disguises. With my localizers I see your pulse and the blood flow in your brain…You think that someday you’ll dance on my grave, no?”
“I—” Damn. An expert, using the very best invasive probes, couldn’t see that much about another’s attitude. Larson was just guessing—or the localizers were even more a treasure than Pham had thought. Pham’s awe and caution were tinged with anger. The other was mocking him. Well then, truly: “In a sense, yes. If you accept the trade I’m hoping for, you will live just as many years as I. But I am Qeng Ho. I sleep decades between the stars. You Customer civilizations are ephemera to us.” There. That should raise your blood pressure.
“Fleet Captain, you remind me a little of Fred down there in the pool. Again, no real insult intended. Fred is a luksterfiske.” He must be talking about the creature that Pham had noticed diving near the waterfall. “Fred is curious about lots of things. He’s been hopping around since you arrived, trying to figure you out. Can you see, right now he’s sitting at the edge of the pond? Two armored tentacles are tickling the grass about three meters from your feet.”
Pham felt a shock of surprise. He had thought those were vines. He followed the slender limbs back to the water…yes, there were four eye stalks, four unblinking eyes. They glittered yellow in the waning light of Trygve’s sky arch. “Fred has lived a long time. Archeologists have found his breeding documents, a little experiment with native wildlife just before the Fall. He was some rich man’s pet, about as smart as a hund. But Fred is very old. He lived through the Fall. He was something of a legend in these parts. You are right, Fleet Captain; if you live long enough you see much. In the Middle Ages, Dirby was first a ruin, then the beginning of a great kingdom—its lords mined the secrets of the earlier age, to their own great profit. For a time, this hillside was the senate of those rulers. During the Renaissance, this was a slum and the lake at the bottom of the hill an open sewer. Even the name ‘Huskestrade’—the epitome of high-class modern Dirby addresses—once meant something like ‘Street of the Outhouses.’
“But Fred survived it all. He was the legend of the sewers, his existence disbelieved by sensible folk until three centuries ago. Now he lives with full honor—in the cleanest water.” There was fondness in the old man’s voice. “So Fred has lived long, and he’s seen much. He’s still intellectually alive, as much as a luksterfiske can be. Witness his beady eyes upon us. But Fred knows far less of the world and his own history than I do from reading history.”
“Not a valid analogy. Fred is a dumb animal.”
“True. You are a bright human and you fly between the stars. You live a few hundred years, but those years are spread across a span as great as Fred’s. What more do you really see? Civilizations rise and fall, but all technical civilizations know the greatest secrets now. They know which social mechanisms normally work, and which ones quickly fail. They know the means to postpone disaster and evade the most foolish catastrophes. They know that even so, each civilization must inevitably fall. The electronics that you want from me may not exist anywhere else in Human Space—but I’m sure that equipment that good has been invented by humans before, and will be again. Similarly for the medical technology you correctly assume we want from you. Humankind as a whole is in a steady state, even if our domain is slowly expanding. Yes, compared to you I am like a bug in the forest, alive for one day. But I see as much as you; I live as much as you. I can study my histories and the radio accounts that float between the stars. I can see all the variety of triumph and barbarism that you Qeng Ho do.”
“We gather the best. With us it never dies.”
“I wonder. There was another trading fleet that came to Trygve Ytre when I was a young man. They were totally unlike you. Different language, different culture. Interstellar traders are simply a niche, not a culture.” Sura argued that, too. Here, in this ancient garden, the quiet words seemed to weigh more heavily than when Sura Vinh spoke them; Gunnar Larson’s voice was almost hypnotic. “Those earlier traders did not have your airs, Fleet Captain. They hoped to make their fortune, to ultimately go somewhere else and set up a planetary civilization.”
“Then they would no longer be Traders.”
“True; perhaps they would be something more. You’ve been in many planetary systems. Your manifest says you’ve spent a number of years at Namqem, long enough to appreciate a planetary civilization. We have hundreds of millions of people living within a few light-seconds of each other. The local net that spans Trygve Ytre gives almost every citizen a view on Human Space that you can only have when you come to port…More than anything, your trading life between the stars is a Ruritania of the Mind.”
Pham didn’t recognize the reference, but he got the other’s point. “Magnate Larson, I wonder that you want to live long. You have everything figured out—a universe free of progress, where all things die and no good is accumulated.” Pham’s words were partly sarcasm, partly honest puzzlement. Gunnar Larson had opened windows, and the view was bleak.
Barely audible, a sigh. “You don’t read v
ery much, do you, son?” Strange. Pham did not think the other was probing anymore. There was something like sad amusement in the question.
“I read enough.” Sura herself complained that Pham spent too much time with manuals. But Pham had started late, and had spent his whole life trying to catch up. So what if his education was a little skewed?
“You ask me the real point of it all. Each of us must take his own path on that, Fleet Captain. Different paths have their own advantages, their own perils. But for your own, human, sake…you should consider: Each civilization has its time. Each science has its limits. And each of us must die, living less than half a thousand years. If you truly understand those limits…then you are ready to grow up, to know what counts.” He was silent for a while. “Yes…just listen to the peace. It’s a gift to be able to do that. Too much time is spent in frenzied rushing. Listen to the breeze in the lestras. Watch Fred try to figure us out. Listen to the laughter of your children and your grandchildren. Enjoy the time you have, however it is given to you, and for however long.”
Larson leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be staring out at the starless darkness that was the center of Trygve’s disk. The arch of light from the eclipsed sun was dim and uniform all around the disk. The lightning had long since vanished; Pham guessed that seeing it was some function of viewing angle and the orientation of Trygve’s thunderheads. “An example, Fleet Captain. Sit and feel and see: sometimes, at mid-eclipse, there is an especial beauty. Watch the middle of Trygve’s disk.” Seconds passed. Pham stared upward. Trygve’s lower latitudes were normally so dark…but now: There was faint red, first so dim that Pham thought it might just be a figment of suggestibility. The light brightened slowly, a deep, deep red, like sword steel still too cold for the hammer. There were bands of dark crossing it.