by Vernor Vinge
“The light is from the depths of Trygve itself. You know we get some direct warming from the planet. Sometimes, when the cloud canyons are oriented just right and the upper storms are gone, we have a very deep view—and we can see its glow with the naked eye.” The light came a little brighter. Pham glanced around the garden. Everything was in shades of red, but he could see more now than he had glimpsed in the lightning. The tall, stranded trees above the pond—they were part of the waterfall, guiding the water in extra swirls and pools. Clouds of flying things moved between the tree branches, and for a few moments they sang. Fred had climbed all the way out of the pond. He sat on multiple leg paddles and his shorter tentacles twitched upward, toward the light in the sky.
They watched in silence. Pham had observed Trygve with multispec on the way in from the asteroids. He wasn’t seeing anything now that was news to him. The whole show was just a happenstance of geometry and timing. And yet…being tied to a single place, on a course that was determined beyond human control, he could see how Customers might be impressed when the universe chose to reveal something. It was ridiculous, but he could feel some of the awe himself.
And then Trygve’s heart was dark again and the singing in the trees died away; the whole show had lasted less than one hundred seconds.
It was Larson who broke the silence. “I’m sure we can do business, my young-old man. In a measure I shouldn’t reveal, we do want your medical technology. But still, I would be grateful for your answer to my original question. What will you do with the Larson localizers? Among the unsuspecting, they are an espionage miracle. Abused, they lead to ubiquitous law enforcement, and a quick end to civilization. Who will you sell them to?”
For some reason, Pham answered him frankly. As the eastern limb of Trygve slowly brightened, Pham explained his vision of empire, the empire of all Humankind. It was something that he had never told a mere Customer. It was something he told only certain Qeng Ho, the ones who seemed the brightest and the most flexible. Even then, most could not accept the whole plan. Most were like Sura, rejecting Pham’s real goal, but more than willing to profit from a genuine Qeng Ho culture…“So, we may keep the localizers to ourselves. It will cost us trade, but there is an edge we need over the Customer civilizations. The common language, the synchronized voyage plans, our public databases—all those things will give our Qeng Ho a cohesive culture. But tricks like these localizers will take us a step beyond that. In the end, we will not be random occupiers of the ‘trading niche’; we will be the surviving culture of Humankind.”
Larson was silent for a long moment. “It’s a marvelous dream you have, son,” Larson said. The obscure amusement was gone from his voice. “A League of Humankind, breaking the wheel of time. I’m sorry, I cannot believe we’ll ever reach the summit of your dream. But the foothills, the lower slopes of it…those are something marvelous, and perhaps attainable. The bright times could be brighter and they could last longer…”
Larson was an extraordinary person, Customer or no. But for whatever reason, he had the same blinders as Sura Vinh. Pham slumped back onto the soft wooden bench. After a moment, Larson continued. “You’re disappointed. You respected me enough to hope for more. You see rightly about many things, Fleet Captain. You see marvelously clear for someone from…Ruritania.” His voice seemed to smile gently. “You know, my family’s lineage is two thousand years deep. That’s a blink of the Trader’s eye—but only because Traders spend most of their time in sleep. And beyond the wisdom we have gathered directly, I and those before me have read of other places and times, a hundred worlds, a thousand civilizations. There are things about your ideas that could work. There are things about your ideas that are more plausibly hopeful than anything since the Age of Failed Dreams. I think I have insights that could be helpful…”
They talked through the rest of the eclipse, as the eastern limb of Trygve brightened, and the sun’s disk formed out of the planet’s depths and climbed toward open sky. The sky brightened into blue. And still they talked. Now it was Gunnar Larson who had the most to say. He was trying to be clear, and Pham was recording what the old man said. But maybe Aminese was not such a perfect mutual language as he thought; there was a lot of it that Pham never understood.
Along the way, they hit a deal for Pham’s entire medical manifest, and for the Larson localizers. There were other items—a breeding sample of the mid-eclipse song creatures—but overall the trading was very easy. There was so much benefit going in both directions…and Pham was overwhelmed by the other things that Gunnar Larson had to say, the advice that might be worthless but that had the stench of wisdom.
Pham’s voyage to Trygve Ytre was one of the more profitable of his trading career, but it was that dark-red conversation with the Ytreisch mystic that stuck the deepest in Pham Nuwen’s memory. Afterward, he was certain Larson had used some kind of psychoactive drugs on him; Pham could never have been so suggestible otherwise. But…maybe it didn’t matter. Gunnar Larson had had good ideas—the ones Pham could understand, anyway. That garden and the sense of peace that surrounded it—those were powerful, impressive things. Coming back from Trygve Ytre, Pham understood the peace that came from a living garden, and he understood the power of the mere appearance of wisdom. The two insights could be combined. Biologicals had always been a critical trade item…but now they would be more. The new Qeng Ho would have an ethic of living things at its heart. Every vehicle that could support a park should have one. The Qeng Ho would gather the best of living things as fanatically as they did the best of technology. That part of the old man’s advice had been very clear. Qeng Ho would have a reputation for understanding living things, for a timeless attachment to nature.
Thus were the park and bonsai traditions born. The parks were a major overhead, but in the millennia since Trygve Ytre, they had become the deepest and most loved of all the Qeng Ho traditions.
And Trygve Ytre and Gunnar Larson? Larson was millennia dead, of course. The civilization at Ytre had barely outlived the man. There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror. Most likely, Larson’s own localizers had precipitated the end. All the wisdom, all the inscrutability, hadn’t helped his world much.
Pham shifted in his sleep hammock. Thinking about Ytre and Larson always left him uneasy. It was wasted time…except tonight. Tonight he needed the mood of the time after that meeting. He needed something of the kinesthetic memory of dealing with the localizers. There must be dozens in this room by now. What was the pattern of motion and body state that would trigger them to talk back to him? Pham pulled the hammock wrap fully over his hands. Inside, his fingers played at a phantom keyboard. Surely that was too obvious. Until he had rapport, nothing like keystrokes should have an effect. Pham sighed, changed breathing and pulse yet again…and recaptured the awe of his first practice sessions with the Larson localizers.
A pale blue light, bluer than blue, blinked once near the edge of his vision. Pham opened his eyes a slit. The room was midnight dark. The light from the sleep panel was too faint to reveal colors. Nothing moved except the slow drifting of his hammock in the ventilator’s breeze. The blue light had been from elsewhere. From inside his optic nerve. Pham closed his eyes, repeated the breathing exercise. The blue, blinking light appeared once more. It was the effect of a localizer array’s synthesized beam, guiding off the two he had set by his temple and in his ear. As communication went, it was very crude, no more impressive than the random sparkles that most people ignore all the time. The system was programmed to be very cautious about revealing itself. This time he kept his eyes closed, and didn’t change the level of his breath or the calmness of his pulse. He curled two fingers toward his palm. A second passed. The light blinked again, responding. Pham coughed, waited, moved his right arm just so. The blue light blinked: One, Two, Three…it was a pulse train, counting binary for him. He echoed back to it, using the codes that he had set up long ago.
He was past the challenge/response
module. He was in! The lights that flickered behind his eyes were almost random stimuli. It would take Ksecs to train the localizer net to the precision that this sort of display could have. The optic nerve was simply too large, too complex for instantly clear video. No matter. The net was reliably talking to him now. The old customizations were coming out of hiding. The localizers had established his physical parameters; he could talk to them in any number of ways from now on. He had almost 3Msec remaining in his current Watch. That should be time enough to do the absolutely necessary, to invade the fleet net and establish a new cover story. What would it be? Something shameful, yes. Some shameful reason for “Pham Trinli” to play the buffoon all these years. A story that Nau and Brughel could relate to and think to use as a lever against him. What?
Pham felt a smile steal across his face. Zamle Eng, may your slave-trading soul rot in Hell. You caused me so much grief. Maybe you can do me some posthumous good.
TWENTY-THREE
“The Children’s Hour of Science.” What an innocent name. Ezr returned from his long off-Watch to find that it had become his personal nightmare. Qiwi promised; how could she let this happen? But every live show was more of a circus than the last.
And today’s might be the worst yet. With good luck it might also be the last.
Ezr drifted into Benny’s about a thousand seconds before show time. Till the last moment, he’d intended to watch it from his room, but masochism had won another round. He settled into the crowd and listened silently to the chatter.
Benny’s booze parlor had become the central institution of their existence at L1. The parlor was sixteen years old now. Benny himself was on a twenty-five-percent duty cycle; he and his father shared the running of the place with Gonle Fong and others. The old wallpaper had blistered in places, and in some places the illusion of three-dimensional view was lost. Everything here was unofficial, either appropriated from other sites in the L1 cloud, or made from diamonds and ice and airsnow. Ali Lin had even come up with a fungal matrix that allowed the growing of incredible wood, complete with grain and something like growth rings. Sometime during Ezr’s long absence, the bar and the walls had all been paneled in dark, polished wood. It was a comfortable place, almost what free Qeng Ho might make…
The parlor’s tables were carved with the names of people you might not have seen for years, people on Watch shifts that didn’t overlap your own. The picture above the bar was a continuously updated copy of Nau’s Watch Chart. As with most things, the Emergents used standard Qeng Ho notation. A single glance at the chart and you could see how many Msecs—objective time or personal—it would be before you ever met any particular person.
During Ezr’s off-Watch, Benny had added to the Watch Chart. Now it showed the current Spider date, in Trixia’s notation: 60//21. The twenty-first year of the current Spider “generation,” which was the sixtieth sun-cycle since the founding of some dynasty or other. There was an old Qeng Ho saying, “You know you’ve stayed too long when you start using the locals’ calendar.” 60//21. Twenty-one years since the Relight, since Jimmy and the others had died. After the generation and year number, there were the day number and the time in Ladille “hours” and “minutes,” a base-sixty system that the translators had never bothered to rationalize. And now everyone who came to the bar could read those times as easily as they could read a Qeng Ho chron. They knew to the second when Trixia’s show would begin.
Trixia’s show. Ezr ground his teeth hard together. A public slave show, and the worst of it was that no one seemed to care. Bit by bit, we are becoming Emergents.
Jau Xin and Rita Liao and half a dozen other couples—two of them Qeng Ho—were clustered around their usual tables, babbling about what might happen today. Ezr sat at the periphery of the group, fascinated and repelled. Nowadays, even some of the Emergents were his friends. Jau Xin, for instance. Xin and Liao had much of the Emergent moral blindness, but they also had touching, human problems. And sometimes, when no one else might notice, Ezr saw something in Xin’s eyes. Jau was bright, academically inclined. Except for his good luck in the Emergent lottery, his university days would have ended in Focus. Most Emergents could double-think their way around such things; sometimes Jau could not.
“—so afraid this will be the last show,” Rita Liao looked genuinely distraught.
“Don’t gloom on it, Rita. We don’t even know if this is a serious problem.”
“That’s for sure.” Gonle Fong drifted in headfirst, from above. She distributed flasks of Diamonds and Ice all around. “I think the zipheads—” She glanced apologetically at Ezr. “—I think the translators have finally lost it. The ads for this show just don’t make any sense.”
“No, no. They’re really quite clear.” It was one of the Emergents, with a fairly good explanation of what the “out-of-phase perversion” was all about. The problem wasn’t with the translators; the problem was with the human ability to accept the bizarre.
“The Children’s Hour of Science” had been one of the first voice broadcasts that Trixia and the others had translated. Just mapping audio to the previously translated written forms had been a triumph. The early shows—fifteen objective years ago—had been printed translations. They’d been discussed in Benny’s parlor, but with the same abstract interest as the latest ziphead theories about the OnOff star. As the years passed, the show had become popular for itself. Fine. But sometime in the last 50Msec, Qiwi Lin had worked a deal with Trud Silipan. Every nine or ten days, Trixia and the other translators were put on exhibit, a live show. So far this Watch, Ezr hadn’t spoken more than ten words to Qiwi. She promised to look after Trixia. What do you say to someone who breaks such a promise? Even now, he didn’t believe Qiwi was a traitor. But she was in bed with Tomas Nau. Maybe she used that “position” to protect Qeng Ho interests. Maybe. In the end, it all seemed to benefit Nau.
Ezr had seen four “performances” now. More than any normal human translator, far more than any machine system, each ziphead put emotion and body language into the interpretation.
“Rappaport Digby” was the zipheads’ name for the show’s host. (Where do they get those crazy names? People still asked that. Ezr knew the names came mostly from Trixia. That was one of the few things he and Trixia could really talk about, his knowledge of the First Classicism. Sometimes she asked him for new words. In fact, Ezr had suggested the “Digby” name, years ago. The word fit something she saw in the background of this particular Spider.) Ezr knew the translator who played Rappaport Digby. Outside of the show, Zinmin Broute was a typical ziphead, irritable, fixated, uncommunicative. But now, when he appeared as the Spider Rappaport Digby, he was kindly and garrulous, a patient explainer to children…It was like seeing a zombie briefly animated by someone else’s soul.
Each new Watch saw the Spider children a little differently. After all, most Watches were only a twenty-five-percent duty cycle; the Spider children lived four years for every one that most spacers lived. Rita and some of the others took to visualizing human children to go with the voices. The pictures were scattered across the parlor’s wallpaper. Pictures of imaginary human children, with the names Trixia had chosen. “Jirlib” was short, with tousled dark hair and a mischievous smile. “Brent” was larger, not as cocky-looking as his brother. Benny had told him how Ritser Brughel once replaced the smiling faces with pictures of real Spiders: low-slung, skeletal, armored—images from the statuary Ezr had seen in his landing on Arachna, supplemented with low-res pics from the snoopersats.
Brughel’s vandalism hadn’t mattered; he didn’t understand what was behind the popularity of “The Children’s Hour.” Tomas Nau obviously did understand, and was perfectly content that the customers at Benny’s booze parlor could sublimate the greatest personnel problem his little kingdom faced. Even more than the Qeng Ho expedition, the Emergents had expected to live in luxury. They had expected that there would be ever-expanding resources, that marriages planned at home could result in children and families here in
the OnOff system…
Now all that was postponed. Our own out-of-phase taboo. Couples like Xin and Liao had only their dreams for the future—and the children’s words and children’s thoughts that came from the translation of “The Children’s Hour.”
Even before the live shows, the humans noticed that all the children were the same age. Year by Arachnan year they aged, but when new children came on the show, they were the same age as those replaced. The earliest translations had been lessons about magnetism and static electricity, all free of mathematics. Later the lessons introduced analysis and quantitative methods.
About two years ago, there had been a subtle change, remarked on in the ziphead’s written reports—and instantly, instinctively noticed by Jau Xin and Rita Liao: “Jirlib” and “Brent” had appeared on the show. They were introduced as any other children, but Trixia’s translations made them seem younger than the others. Showmaster Digby never remarked on the difference, and the math and science in the show continued to become more sophisticated.
“Victory Junior” and “Gokna” were the latest additions to the cast, new on this Watch. Ezr had seen Trixia play them. Her voice had hopped with childish impatience; sometimes she had bubbled with laughter. Rita’s pictures showed these two Spiders as laughing seven-year-olds. It was all too pat. Why should the average age of children on the show be declining? Benny claimed the explanation was obvious. “The Children’s Hour” must be under new management. The ubiquitous Sherkaner Underhill was credited with writing the lessons now. And Underhill was apparently the father of all the new children.
By the time Ezr had returned from coldsleep, the show was packing the parlor to capacity. Ezr saw four performances, each a private horror for him. And then, surcease. “The Children’s Hour” had not been broadcast for twenty days now. Instead, there had been a stern announcement: “After numerous listener allegations, the owners of this broadcasting station have determined that the family of Sherkaner Underhill practices the out-of-phase perversion. Pending resolution of this situation, broadcasts of ‘The Children’s Hour of Science’ are suspended.” Broute had read the announcement with a voice quite unlike that of Rappaport Digby. The new voice was cold and distant, and full of indignation.