by Vernor Vinge
Vinh’s fingers tapped at the keyboard. His ongoing assignment was a good cover for the questions he wanted to ask. Nau had an insatiable interest in everything Qeng Ho. Vinh was to write him summaries, and propose research tracks for the zipheads. However mellow and diplomatic he might seem, Ezr had long ago realized that Nau was even crazier than Brughel. Nau studied in order to someday rule.
Be careful. The places he really wanted to look must be fully covered by the needs of his report writing. On top of it all, he must keep up a random pattern of truly irrelevant references. Let the snoops try to find his intent in those!
He needed a list: Qeng Ho males, alive at the beginning of the modern Qeng Ho, who were not known to be dead at the time Captain Park’s expedition left Triland. The list shrank substantially when he also eliminated those known to be far from this corner of Human Space. It shrank again when he required that they be present at Brisgo Gap. The conjunction of five booleans, the work of a spoken command or a column of keystrokes—but Ezr could not afford such simplicity. Each boolean was part of other searches, in support of things he really needed for the report. The results were scattered across pages of analysis, a name here, a name there. The orrery floating by the ceiling showed less than 15Ksec remaining before the walls of his quarters would begin to glow dawnlight…but he had his list. Did it mean anything? A handful of names, some pale and improbable. The booleans themselves were very hazy. The Qeng Ho interstellar net was an enormous thing, in a sense the largest structure in the histories of Humankind. But it was all out of date, by years or centuries. And even the Qeng Ho sometimes lied among themselves, especially where the distances were short and confusion could give commercial advantage. A handful of names. How many and who? Even scanning the list was painstakingly slow, else the hidden watchers would surely notice. Some names he recognized: Tran Vinh.21, that was Sura Vinh’s g’grandson and the male-side founder of Ezr’s own branch of the Vinh Family; King Xen.03, Sura’s chief armsman at Brisgo Gap. Xen could not have been Trinli. He was just over 120 centimeters tall, and nearly as wide. Other names belonged to people who had never been famous. Jung, Trap, Park…Park?
Vinh couldn’t help the surprise. If Brughel’s zipheads reviewed the records, they would surely notice. The damn localizers could probably pick up on pulse, maybe even blood pressure. If they can see the surprise, make it a big thing. “Lord of All Trade,” Vinh whispered, bringing the picture and bio material up on all his windows. It really did look like their own S. J. Park, Fleet Captain of the mission to the OnOff star. He remembered the man from his own childhood; that Park hadn’t seemed so very old…In fact, some of this biodata seemed vague. And the DNA record did not match the latter-day Park. Hmm. That might be enough to deflect Nau and Reynolt; they didn’t have Ezr’s firsthand experience with backstairs Family affairs. But the S. J. Park at Brisgo Gap—two thousand years ago—had been a ship’s captain. He’d ended up with Ratko Vinh. There had been some weird scandal involving a failed marriage contract. After that, there was nothing.
Vinh followed a couple of obvious leads on Park—then gave up, the way you might when you learned something surprising but not universe-breaking. The other names on the list…it took him another Ksec to get through them, and none looked familiar. His mind kept returning to S. J. Park, and he almost panicked. How well can the enemy read me? He looked at some pictures of Trixia, surrendered to the familiar pain; he did that often enough just before finally going to bed. Behind his tears, his mind raced. If Ezr was right about Park, he went way, way back. No wonder his parents had treated Park as more than a young contract captain. Lord, he could have been on Pham Nuwen’s voyage to the far side. After Brisgo Gap, when Nuwen was about as rich as he’d ever been, he’d departed with a grand fleet, heading for the far side of Human Space. That was typical of Nuwen’s gestures. The far side was at least four hundred light-years away. The merchanting details of its environment were ancient history by the time they arrived on this side. And his proposed path would take him through some of the oldest regions of Human Space. For centuries after the departure, the Qeng Ho Net continued to report the progress of the Prince of Canberra, of his fleets growing and sometimes shrinking. Then the stories faltered, often lacked valid authentication. Nuwen probably never got more than partway to his goal. As a child, Ezr and his friends had often played at being the Lost Prince. There were so many ways it might have ended, some adventurous and gruesome, some—the most likely—involving old age and a string of business failures, ships lost to bankruptcy across dozens of light-years. And so the fleet had never returned.
But parts of it might have. A person here or there, perhaps losing heart with a voyage that would take them forever far from their own time. Who knew just which individuals returned? Very likely, S. J. Park had known. Very likely S. J. Park had known precisely who Pham Trinli was—and had worked to protect that identity. Who from the era of Brisgo Gap could be so important, so well known…? S. J. Park had been loyal to someone from that era. Who?
And then Ezr remembered hearing that Captain Park had personally chosen the name of his flagship. The Pham Nuwen.
Pham Trinli. Pham Nuwen. The Lost Prince of Canberra.
And I have finally gone totally crazy. There were library checks that would shoot down this conclusion in a second. Yes, and that would disprove nothing; if he were right, the library itself would be a subtle lie. Yeah, sure. This was the sort of desperate hallucination he must guard against. If you raise your desires high enough, certainty can grow out of the background noise. But at least it got me off the rotisserie!
It was awfully late. He stared at the pictures of Trixia for a while longer, lost in sad memories. Inside, he calmed down. There would be other false alarms, but he had years ahead of him, a lifetime of patient looking. He would find a crack in the dungeon somewhere, and when it happened he wouldn’t have to wonder if it was a trick of his imagination.
Sleep came, and dreams filled with all the usual distress and the new shame, and now mixed with his latest insanity. Eventually there was something like peace, floating in the dark of his cabin. Mindless.
And then another dream, so real that he didn’t doubt it until it was over. Little lights were shining in his eyes, but only when he kept his eyes closed. Awake and sitting, the room was dark as ever. Lying down, eyes asleep, then the sparkles started again.
The lights were talking to him, a game of blinkertalk. When he was very young he had played a lot of that, flitting from rock to rock across the out-of-doors. Tonight, a single pattern repeated and repeated, and in Vinh’s dream state the meaning formed almost effortlessly:
“NOD UR HEAD IF U UNDRSTND ME…NOD—”
Vinh made a wordless groan of surprise—and the pattern changed:
“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP…” for a long time. And then it changed again. “NOD UR HEAD IF U UNDRSTND ME…”
That was easy too. Vinh moved his head a fraction of a centimeter.
“OK. PRETEND TO BE ASLEEP. CLOSE UR HAND. BLINK ON PALM.”
After all the years, conspiracy was suddenly so easy. Just pretend your palm was a keyboard and type at your fellow-conspirators. Of course! His hands were under the covers, so no one else could see! He would have laughed out loud at the cleverness, except that would be out of character. It was so obvious now who had come to save them. He closed his right hand and tapped: “HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?”
For a long time there were no more little flashes. Ezr’s mind drifted slowly toward deeper sleep.
Then: “U NU BFR TNITE? DAM ME.” Another long pause. “I VRY SORRY. I THOT U BROKN.”
Vinh nodded to himself, a little proud. And maybe someday Qiwi would forgive him, and Trixia would return to life, and…
“OK,” Ezr tapped at the Prince. “HOW MNY PEOPLE WE GOT?”
“SECRET. ONLY I KNO. EACH CAN TALK BUT NO ONE KNOS ANYONE ELSE.” Pause. “TILL U TONITE.”
Aha. Almost the perfect conspiracy. The members could coope
rate, but no one but the Prince could betray anyone else. Things would be so much easier now.
“WELL IM VRY TIRED NOW. WANNA SLEEP. WE CAN TALK MORE LATR.”
Pause. Was his request so strange? Nights are for sleeping. “OK. LATR.”
As consciousness drifted finally away, Vinh shrugged deeper into his hammock and smiled to himself. He was not alone. And all along, the secret had been as close as his hand. Amazing!
The next morning, Vinh woke up rested and strangely happy. Huh. What had he done to deserve this?
He floated into the shower bag and sudsed up. Yesterday had been so dark, so shameful. Bitter reality seeped back into him, but strangely slow…Yeah, there had been a dream. That was not unusual, but most of his dreams hurt so much to remember. Vinh turned the shower to dry and hung for a moment in the swirling jets of air. What had it been about this one?
Yes! It was another of those miracle escape dreams, but this time things hadn’t turned bad at the end. Nau and Brughel had not leaped out of hiding at the last moment.
So what had been the secret weapon this time? Oh, the usual illogic of dreams, some kind of magic that turned his own hands into a comm link with the chief conspirator. Pham Trinli? Ezr chuckled at the thought. Some dreams are more absurd than others; strange how he still felt comforted by this one.
He shrugged into his clothes and set off down the temp’s corridors, his progress the typical zero-gee push, pull, bounce at the turns, swing to avoid those moving more slowly or going in the other direction. Pham Nuwen. Pham Trinli. There must be a billion people with that given name, and a hundred flagships named Pham Nuwen. Recollection of his library search of the night before gradually percolated back to mind, the crazy ideas he’d been thinking just before he went to bed.
But the truth about Captain Park had been no dream. By the time he arrived at the dayroom, he was moving more slowly.
Ezr drifted headfirst into the dayroom, said hello to Hunte Wen by the door. The atmosphere was relatively relaxed. He quickly discovered that Reynolt had brought her surviving Focused back online; there had been no more flareups. On the far ceiling, Pham Trinli was pontificating about what had caused the runaway and why the danger was past. This was the Pham Trinli he had dealt with several Ksecs of each wake period on every overlapping Watch since the ambush. Suddenly the dream and the library session before it were reduced to the proper and completely absurd perspective.
Trinli must have heard him talking to Hunte. The old fraud turned, and for a moment looked back down the room at Vinh. He didn’t say anything, didn’t nod, and even if an Emergent spy were looking right down Vinh’s line of sight, it would have not likely mattered. But to Ezr Vinh, the moment seemed to last forever. In that moment, the buffoon that had been Pham Trinli was gone. There was no bluster in that face, but there was lonely, quiet authority and an acknowledgment of their strange conversation of the night before. Somehow it had not been a dream. The communication had not been magical. And this old man truly was the Lost Prince of Canberra.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“But it’s firstsnow. Don’t you want to see it?” Victory’s voice took on a whine, a tone that worked with virtually no one except this one older brother.
“You’ve played in snow before.”
Sure, when Daddy took them on trips to the far north. “But Brent! This is firstsnow at Princeton. The radio says it’s all over the Craggies.”
Brent was absorbed in his dowel and hub frameworks, endless shiny surfaces that got more and more complicated. By himself, he never would have considered sneaking out of the house. He continued working at his designs for several seconds, ignoring her. In fact, that was how Brent treated the unexpected. He was quite good with his hands, but ideas came slowly to him. Beyond that he was very shy—surly, grown-ups often said. His head didn’t move, but Viki could tell he was looking at her. His hands never slowed as they weaved back and forth across the surface of the model, sometimes building, sometimes wrecking. Finally, he said, “We aren’t supposed to go out ’less we tell Dad.”
“Pfui. You know he sleeps in. This morning is the coldest yet, but we’ll miss it if we don’t go now. Hey, I’ll leave a note for him.”
Her sister Gokna would have argued the point back and forth, finally exceeding Viki herself in clever rationalizations. Her brother Jirlib would have gotten angry at her manipulation. But Brent didn’t argue, returning instead to his finicky modeling for a few minutes, part of him watching her, part of him studying the dowel and connector pattern that emerged from beneath his hands, and part of him looking out across Princeton at the tinge of frost on the near ridges. Of all her brothers and sisters, he was the one who wouldn’t really want to go. On the other hand, he was the only one she could find this morning, and he was even more grown-up-looking than Jirlib.
After a few moments more, he said, “Well, okay, if that’s what you want.” Victory grinned to herself; as if the outcome were ever in doubt. Getting past Captain Downing would be harder—but not by much.
It was early morning. The sunlight hadn’t reached the streets below Hill House. Victory savored each breath, the faint stinging she felt at the sides of her chest as she tasted the frosty air. The hot blossoms and woodsfairies were still wound tight in the tree branches; they might not even come out today. But there were other things about, things she had only read about before now. In the frost of the coldest hollows, crystal worms edged slowly out. These brave little pioneers wouldn’t last long—Viki remembered the radio show she had done about them last year. These little ones would keep dying except where the cold was good enough to last all day long. And even then, things would have to get much colder before the rooted variety showed up.
Viki skipped briskly through the morning chill, easily keeping up with the slower, longer strides of her big brother. This early there was hardly anyone about. Except for the sound of distant contraction work, she could almost imagine that they were all alone, that the city was deserted. Imagine what it would be like in coming years, when the cold stayed, and they could only go out as Daddy had done in the war with the Tiefers. All the way to the bottom of the hill, Viki built on the idea, turning every aspect of the chilly morning into the fantastical. Brent listened, occasionally offering a suggestion that would have surprised most of Daddy’s grown-up friends. Brent was not so dumb, and he did have an imagination.
The Craggies were thirty miles away, beyond the King’s high castle, beyond the far side of Princeton. No way could they walk there. But today lots of people wanted to travel to the near mountains. Firstsnow meant a fair-sized festival in every land, though of course it happened at various and unpredictable times. Viki knew that if the early snow had been predicted, Dad would have been up early, and Mom might have flown in from Lands Command. The outing would have been a major family affair—but not the least bit adventurous.
A sort of adventure began at the bottom of the hill. Brent was sixteen years old now and he was big for his age. He could pass for in-phase. He had been out on his own often enough before. He said he knew where the express buses made their stops. Today, there were no buses, and scarcely any traffic. Had everyone already gone to the mountains?
Brent marched from one bus stop to another, gradually becoming more agitated. Viki tagged along silently, for once not making any suggestions; Brent got put down often enough that he rarely asserted any sort of knowledge. It hurt when he finally spoke up—even to a little sister—and then turned out to be wrong. After the third false start, Brent hunkered down close to the ground. For a moment, Viki thought maybe he was just going to wait for a bus to come along—a thoroughly unpleasant possibility to Viki. They’d been out for more than an hour and they hadn’t even seen a local jitney. Maybe she would have to stick her pointy little hands into the problem…But after a minute, Brent stood up and started across the street. “I bet the Big Dig people didn’t get the day off. That’s only a mile south of here. There are always buses from there.”
Ha. That was
just what Viki had been about to suggest. Blessed be patience.
The street was still in morning shadow. This was the deepest part of the winter season at Princeton. Here and there the frost in the darker nooks was so deep that it might have been snow itself. But the section they were walking through now was not gardened. The only plants were unruly weeds and free crawlers. On sweaty, hot days between storms, the place would have been alive with midges and drinkers.
On either side of the street were multistory warehouses. Things weren’t so quiet and deserted here. The ground buzzed and thrummed with the sound of unseen diggers. Freight trucks moved in and out of the area. Every few hundred yards, a plot of land was barricaded off from all but the construction crews. Viki tugged at Brent’s arms, urging him to crawl under the barricades. “Hey, it’s our dad who’s the reason for all this. We deserve to see!” Brent would never accept such a rationalization, but his little sister was already past the no-trespassing signs. He had to come along just to protect her.
They crept past tall bundles of reinforcement steel, and piles of masonry. There was something powerful and alien about this place. In the house on the hill, everything was so safe, so orderly. Here…well, she could see endless opportunities for the careless to lacerate a foot, cut an eye. Heck, if you tipped over one of those standing slabs, it would squash you flat. All the possibilities were crystal clear in her mind…and exciting. They carefully made their way to the lip of a caisson, avoiding the eyes of the workman and the various interesting opportunities for fatal accidents.
The railing was two strands of twine. If you don’t want to die, don’t fall off! Viki and her brother hunkered close to the ground and stuck their heads over the abyss. For a moment, it was too dark to see. The heated air that drifted up carried the smell of burning oil and hot metal. It was a caress and a slap in the head all at once. And the sounds: workers shouting, metal grinding against metal, engines, and a strange hissing. Viki dipped her head, letting all her eyes adjust to the gloom. There was light, but nothing like day or night. She had seen small electric-arc lamps in Daddy’s labs. These ones were huge: pencils of light glowing mostly in the ultra and far ultra—colors you never see bright except in the disk of the sun. The color splashed off the hooded workers, spread speckling glints up and down the shaft…There were other less spectacular lights, steadier ones, electric lamps that shone local splotches of tamed color here and there. Still twelve years before the Dark, and they were building a whole city down there. She could see avenues of stone, huge tunnels leading off from the walls of the shaft. And in the tunnels she glimpsed darker holes…ramps to smaller diggings? Buildings and homes and gardens would come later, but already the caves were mostly dug. Looking down, Viki felt an attraction that was new to her, the natural, protective attraction of a deepness. But what these workers were doing was a thousand times grander than any ordinary deepness. If all you wanted to do was sleep frozen through the Dark, you needed just enough space for your sleeping pool and a startup cache. Such already existed in the city deepness beneath the old town center—and had existed there for almost twenty generations. This new construction was to live in, awake. In some places, where air seal and insulation could be assured, it was built right at ground level. In other areas, it was dug down hundreds of feet, an eerie reverse of the buildings that made Princeton’s skyline.