by Vernor Vinge
The last Msecs before the Meeting were a frantic rearrangement of schedules. Namqem solar system still lacked decent automation. There would probably be a decade more during which outside help would be necessary to keep things from backsliding, to make sure that no more opportunists surfaced. But Pham wanted his own people at the Meeting. And Sura didn’t play games with his wish. Together, they set up a scheme that would bring all Pham’s people to the temp, and still not put the new governance of Namqem at risk.
And finally, Pham’s time came. His one, greatest opportunity to make things work. He looked out past the veil of the entrance curtains, at the sweep of the hall. Sura had just finished her introduction of Pham and was departing the speaker’s platform. Applause swept up from every direction. “Lord—” Pham muttered.
Behind him, Sammy Park said, “Nervous, sir?”
“Damn straight.” In fact, only once had he ever been frightened just this way…when as a little boy he had stepped onto a starship’s bridge and confronted the Traders of the Qeng Ho for the first time. He turned to look at his Flag Captain. Sammy was smiling. Since the rescues of Tarelsk, he had seemed happier than ever before. Too bad. He might not be starfaring again, not with Pham’s fleet, anyway. The people his crew had rescued, they really were his own family. And that cute little great-great-grandniece of his: Jun was a good person, but she had her own ideas about what Sammy should do with his life. Sammy stuck out his hand. “G-good luck, sir.”
And then Pham was through the curtains. He passed Sura on his way up. There was no time to speak, no way to hear. Her frail hand brushed his cheek. He rose to the central platform through wave upon wave of applause. Be calm. There were still at least twenty seconds before he had to say anything. Nineteen, eighteen…The Great Hall was nearly seven hundred meters across, and built in the most ancient tradition of an auditorium. His audience was an almost complete sphere of humanity, stationed at their ease along the inner surface of the hall, and facing on the tiny speaker’s platform. Pham looked this way and that, and up and down, and wherever he looked faces looked back. Correction: There was a swath of empty seats, nearly a hundred thousand, for the Qeng Ho who died in the destruction of Maresk. Sura had insisted on that layout—to honor the dead. Pham had agreed, but he knew that it was also Sura’s way of reminding everyone that what Pham proposed could have a terrible price.
Pham raised his arms as he reached the platform. All across his field of view, he saw the Qeng Ho responding. After a second, their applause came even louder to his ears. Through clear huds, he could not make out faces. From this distance, he could only guess at them according to the seating pattern. There were women all across the crowd. In a few places, they were rare. In most places, they were as common as the men. In some places—the Strentmannian Qeng Ho—women were the overwhelming majority. Maybe he should have appealed more to them; since Strentmann, he had come to realize that women can have the longest view. But the prejudices of medieval Canberra still had some subtle hold on him, and Pham had never really figured out how to lead women.
He turned his palms outward, and waited as the shouting gradually faded. The words of his speech floated in silver before his eyes. He had spent years thinking on this speech, and Msecs since the Rescue, polishing every nuance, every word.
But suddenly he didn’t need the little silver glyphs. Pham’s eyes saw past them to the humanity all around, and his words came effortlessly forth.
“My people!”
The crowd noise died to near silence. A million faces looked up at him, across at him, down at him.
“You hear my voice now with barely a second’s time lag. Here in Meeting, we hear our fellow Qeng Ho, even those from far Earth, in less than a second. For this first and maybe only time, we can see what we all are. And we can decide what we will be.
“My people, congratulations. We have come across light-centuries and rescued a great civilization from extinction. We did this despite the most terrible treachery.” He paused, gestured solemnly at the sweep of empty seats.
“Here at Namqem, we have broken the wheel of history. On a thousand worlds, Humankind has fought and fought, and even made itself extinct. The only thing that saves the race is time and distance—and until now that has also condemned humanity to repeat its failures.
“The old truths still hold: Without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology. But at the same time: Without help from outside, no sessile civilization can persist.”
Pham paused. He felt a wan smile steal across his face. “And so there is hope. Together, the two halves of what Humankind has become can make the whole live forever.” He looked all around, and let his huds magnify individual faces. They were listening. Would they finally agree? “The whole can live forever…if we can make the Qeng Ho more than mere sellers to customers.”
Pham didn’t remember much of the actual speaking of his speech; the ideas and the entreaties were such deep habits in his mind. His recollection was of the faces, the hope he saw in so many, the guarded caution he saw in so many more. In the end, he reminded them that a vote would be coming up, a final call on everything he had ever asked for. “So. Without your help we will surely fail, destroyed by the same wheel that crushes our Customer civilizations. But if you look just a little beyond the trade of the moment, if you make this extra investment in the future, then no dream will be beyond our ultimate reach.”
If the hall had been under acceleration, or on a planetary surface, Pham would have stumbled coming down from the platform. As it was, Sammy Park had to snag him as he passed the entrance curtains.
Above their heads, past the curtains, the sound of applause seemed to be getting louder.
Sura had remained in the anteroom, but there were other new faces—Ratko, Butra, and Qo. His first children, now older than he was.
“Sura!”
Her chair gave a little chuff, and she floated across the space between them.
“Will you congratulate me on my speech?” Pham grinned, still feeling giddy. He extended his hands, gently took Sura’s. She was so frail, so old. Oh Sura! This should be our triumph. Sura was going to lose this one. And now she was so old, she would never see it as anything but defeat. She would never see what they both had wrought.
The applause above them grew still louder. Sura glanced up. “Yes. In every way, you have done better than I had thought. But then, you have always done better than anyone could imagine.” Her synthetic voice managed to sound sad and proud at the same time. She gestured away from the anteroom and the noise. Pham followed her out, and the sounds faded behind him. “But you know how much of this is luck, don’t you?” she continued. “You wouldn’t have had a chance if Namqem hadn’t come apart just as the fleet of fleets arrived.”
Pham shrugged. “It was good luck indeed. But it proved my point, Sura! We both know that a collapse like this can be the deadliest—and we saved them.”
What he could see of Sura’s body was clothed in a quilted business suit that could not disguise the gauntness of her limbs. But her mind and will remained, sustained by the medical unit in her chair. Sura’s shake of the head was as forceful and almost as natural as when she’d been a young woman. “Saved them? You made a difference certainly, but billions still died. Be honest, Pham. It took a thousand years for us to set up this meeting. It’s not the sort of thing that can be done every time some civilization goes down the toilet. And without the Maresk die-off, even your five thousand ships would not have been enough. The whole system would be at the edge of its carrying capacity, with still greater disasters in the near future.”
All that had occurred to Pham; he had argued against variants of the point for Msecs before the Meeting. “But Namqem is the hardest rescue we could possibly face, Sura. An old civilization, entrenched, a civilization exploiting every solar-system resource. We would have had a much easier time with a world threatened with bio-plague or even a totalitarian religion.”
Sura was shaking her head. Even now she ignored what Pham set before her. “No. In most cases, you can make a difference, but more often than not it will be like Canberra—a small difference for the better, and written in Trader blood. You’re right: Without the fleet of fleets, civilization would have died here in Namqem system. But some people would have survived on Namqem world; some of the asteroid-belt urbs might have survived. The old story would have been repeated, and someday there would be civilization here again, even if by external colonization. You have bridged that abyss, and billions are rightly grateful…but it will take years of careful management to bring this system back. Maybe we here”—her hand twitched in the direction of the Meeting Hall—“can do that, and maybe not. But I know that we can’t do it for the universe and for all time.” Sura did something, and her chair chuff’d to a halt.
She turned, extended her arms to touch Pham’s shoulders. And suddenly Pham had the strangest feeling, almost a kinesthetic memory, of looking up into her face and feeling her hands on his shoulders. It was a memory from before they were partners, before they were lovers. A memory from their earliest time on the Reprise: Sura Vinh, the young woman, serious. There were times when she’d gotten so angry with little Pham Nuwen. There were times when she’d reached out to grab his shoulders, tried to hold him still long enough to make him understand what his young barbarian mind chose to ignore. “Son, don’t you see? We span all Human Space, but we can’t manage whole civilizations. You’d need a race of loving slaves to do it. And we Qeng Ho will never be that.”
Pham forced himself to look back into Sura’s eyes. She had argued this since the beginning, and never wavered. I should have known it would come to this someday. So now she would lose, and Pham could do nothing to help her. “I’m sorry Sura. When you give your speech, you can say this to a million people. Many of them will believe. And then we’ll all vote. And—” And from what he had seen in the Great Hall, and what he saw in Sura Vinh’s eyes…for the first time, Pham knew that he had won.
Sura turned away, and her artificial voice was soft. “No. I won’t be giving that speech. Elections? Funny that you should be depending on them now…We’ve heard how you ended the Strentmannian Pogrom.”
The change in topic was absurd, but the comment touched a nerve. “I was down to one ship, Sura. What would you have done?” I saved their damn civilization, the part that wasn’t monstrous.
Sura raised her hand. “I’m sorry…Pham, you are just too lucky, too good.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself now. “For almost a thousand years, you and I have worked to make this meeting. It was always a sham, but along the way, we created a trading culture that may last as long as your optimistic dreams. And I always knew that in the end, when we were all face-to-face in a Grand Meeting, common sense would prevail.” She shook her head, and a smile quavered. “But I never imagined that luck would give you the Namqem debacle so perfectly timed—or that you would master it like magic. Pham, if we follow your way, we’ll likely have disaster here in Namqem within a decade. In a few centuries, the Qeng Ho will fragment into a dozen conflicting structures that all think themselves ‘interstellar governances.’ And the dream we shared will be destroyed.
“You’re right, Pham. You might win the election…and that’s why there won’t be one, at least not the kind you think.”
The words didn’t register for a moment. Pham Nuwen had been exposed to treachery a hundred times. The sense for it was burned into him before he’d ever seen a starship. But…Sura? Sura was the only one he could always trust, his savior, his lover, his best friend, the one he’d schemed with for a lifetime. And now—
Pham looked around the room, his mind undergoing a change-of-ground more profound than any in his life. Besides Sura, there were Sura’s aides, six of them. There were also Ratko and Butra and Qo. Of his own assistants—there was only Sammy Park. Sammy stood a little off to the side; he looked sick.
Finally, he looked back at Sura. “I don’t understand…but whatever the game, there’s no way you can change the election. A million people heard me.”
Sura sighed. “They heard you, and you might have a bare majority in a fair election. But many you think supported you…are really with me.”
She hesitated, and Pham looked again at his three children. Ratko avoided his gaze, but Butra and Qo looked back with grim steadiness. “We never wanted to hurt you, Papa,” Ratko said, finally looking at him. “We love you. This whole charade of a meeting was supposed to show you that the Qeng Ho could not be what you wished. But it didn’t go the way we expected—”
Ratko’s words didn’t matter. It was the look on his children’s faces. It was the same closed stoniness of Pham’s brothers and sisters, one Canberra morning. And all the love in between…a charade?
He looked back at Sura. “So how do you propose to win? With the sudden, accidental death of half a million people? Or just the selective assassination of thirty thousand hardcore Nuwenists? It won’t work, Sura. There are too many good people out there. Maybe you can win this day, but the word will remain, and sooner or later, you’ll have your civil war.”
Sura shook her head. “We’re not killing anyone, Pham. And the word won’t go out, at least not widely. Your speech will be remembered by those in the hall, but their recorders—most are using our information utilities. Our free hospitality, remember? Ultimately your speech will be polished into something…safer.”
Sura continued, “Over the next twenty Ksec, you will be in special meeting with your opposition. Coming out of that you will announce a compromise: The Qeng Ho will put a much greater effort into our network information services, the sort of thing that can help rebuild civilizations. But you will withdraw your notion of interstellar governance, convinced by the arguments of the rest of us.”
A charade. “You could fake that. But afterwards, you’ll still have to kill a lot of people.”
“No. You will announce your new goal, an expedition to the far side of Human Space. It will be clear that this is partly out of bitterness, but you will wish us well. Your far fleet is almost ready, Pham, about twenty degrees back along the Gap. We have equipped it honestly and well. Your fleet’s automation is unusually good, far more expensive than what would be profitable. You won’t need a continuous Watch, and the first wake-up will be centuries from now.”
Pham looked from face to face. Something like Sura’s treachery could work, but only if most of the Fleet Captains that he thought supported him were really like Ratko and Butra and Qo. And then only if they had set up proper lies with their own people. “How…long have you been planning this, Sura?”
“Ever since you were a young man, Pham. Most of the years of my life. But I prayed it would never come to this.”
Pham nodded, numb. If she had planned that long, there would be no obvious mistakes. It didn’t matter. “My fleet awaits, you say?” His lips twisted around the words. “And all the incorrigibles will surely be its crew. How many? Thirty thousand?”
“A good deal less, Pham. We’ve studied your hard-core supporters very carefully.”
Given the choice, who wanted to go on a one-way trip to forever? They had been very careful to keep those supporters out of this room. All but Sammy. “Sammy?”
His Flag Captain met his eyes, but his lips were trembling. “Sir. I’m s-sorry. Jun wants a different life for me. We—we’re still Qeng Ho, but we can’t ship with you.”
Pham inclined his head. “Ah.”
Sura floated closer, and Pham realized that if he pushed off, he could probably grab the handle on her chair and ram his fist right through her scrawny quilted chest. And break my hand for the effort. Sura’s heart had been a machine for centuries. “Son? Pham? It was a beautiful dream, and along the way it made us what we are. But in the end it was just a dream. A failed dream.”
Pham turned away without responding. Now there were guards by the doors, waiting to escort him. He didn’t look at his children. He brushed pa
st Sammy Park without a word. From somewhere in the still, cold depths of his heart, something wished his Flag Captain well. Sammy had betrayed him, but not like the others. And no doubt Sammy believed the lies about a far fleet. He hoped that Sammy would never see through them. Who would ever pay for a fleet such as Sura described? Not crafty merchants like Sura Vinh and her stone-faced children and the others who had plotted this day. Far cheaper, far safer to build a fleet of real coffins. My father would have understood. The best enemies are the ones who sleep without end.
Then Pham was in a long corridor, surrounded by guards who were also strangers. His last vision of Sura’s face still hung in Pham’s imagination. There had been tears in the old woman’s eyes. One last fakery.
A tiny cabin, mostly dark. The kind of room a junior officer might have in a small temp. Work jackets floated in a closet bag. A lapel tag whispered, and a name floated in his eyes: Pham Trinli.
As always, when Pham let the anger fill him, the memories were more vivid than any huds, and the return to the present was a kind of mocking. Sura’s “far fleet” had not been a fleet of coffins. Even now, two thousand years after Sura’s betrayal, Pham still could not explain that. Most likely, there had been other traitors, ones with some power and some conscience, who had insisted that Pham and those who wouldn’t betray him must not be killed. The “fleet” had been scarcely more than refitted ram barges, with space for nothing but the refugees and their coldsleep tanks. But there had been a separate trajectory for each ship of the “fleet.” A thousand years later, they were scattered across the width and height of Human Space.
They had not been killed, but Pham had learned his lesson. He had begun his slow, silent journey back. Sura was beyond mortal reach. But there was still the Qeng Ho that he and she had created, the Qeng Ho that had betrayed him. He still had his dream.
…And he would have died with it at Triland, if Sammy had not dug him up. Now fate and time had handed him a second chance: the promise of Focus.