A Deepness in the Sky Part 15

"Well, obviously the protocols would be different. And the usage, too. But it could change the random trading function into something much more, ah, profitable." He had almost said powerful, powerful, but he knew that would just get him zinged about his "medieval" mind-set. "We could keep a floating database of Customers." but he knew that would just get him zinged about his "medieval" mind-set. "We could keep a floating database of Customers."

Sura shook her head, "But out of date by decades to millennia."

"We could maintain human language standards. Our network programming standards would outlive any Customer government. Our trading culture could last forever."

"But Qeng Ho is just one fish in a random sea of traders.. . .Oh." Pham could see that he was finally getting through. "So the 'culture' of our broadcasts would give partic.i.p.ants a trading edge. So there would be a reinforcement effect."

"Yes, yes! And we could crypto-part.i.tion the broadcasts to protect against nearby compet.i.tion." Pham smiled slyly. The next point was something that little Pham, and probably Pham's father the King of all Northland, could never have conceived. "In fact, we could even have some broadcasts in the clear. The language standards material, for instance, and the low end of our tech libraries. I've been reading the Customer histories. All the way back to Old Earth, the only constant is the churn, the rise of civilization, the fall, as often as not the local extinction of Humankind. Over time, Qeng Ho broadcasts could damp those swings."

Sura was nodding, a far look settling into her eyes. "Yes. If we did it right, we'd end up with Customer cultures that spoke our our language, were molded to our trading needs, and used language, were molded to our trading needs, and used our our programming environment-" Her gaze snapped up to his face. "You still have empire on the brain, don't you?" programming environment-" Her gaze snapped up to his face. "You still have empire on the brain, don't you?"

Pham just smiled.

Sura had a million objections, but she had caught the spirit of the idea, recast it into her experience, and now her entire imagination was working alongside his. As the days pa.s.sed, her objections became more like suggestions, and their arguments more a kind of wondrous scheming.

"You're crazy, Pham. . .but that doesn't matter. Maybe it takes a crazy medievalist to be so ambitious. It's like. . .it's like we're creating a civilization out of whole cloth. We can set up our own myths, our own conventions. We'll be in at the ground floor of everything."

"And we'll outlast any compet.i.tion."

"Lord," Sura said softly. (It would be some time before they invented the "Lord of All Trade" and the pantheon of lesser G.o.ds.) "And you know, Namqem is the ideal place to start. They're about as advanced as a civilization can ever get, but they're getting a little cynical and decadent. They have propaganda techs as good as any in human histories. What you're suggesting is strange, but it's trivial compared to ad campaigns on a planetary net. If my cousins are still in Namqem s.p.a.ce, I bet they'd bankroll the operation." She laughed, joyous and almost childlike, and Pham realized how badly the fear of bankruptcy and disgrace had bent her down. "h.e.l.l, we're gonna turn a profit profit !" !"

The rest of their Watch was a nonstop orgy of imagination and invention and l.u.s.t. Pham came up with a combination of beamed and broadcast interstellar radio, schedules that could keep fleets and families in synch across centuries. Sura accepted most of the protocol design, wonder and obvious delight in her eyes. As for the human engineering, Pham's scheme of hereditary lords and military fleets-Sura laughed at those, and Pham did not argue the judgment. After all, in people-things he was still scarcely more than a thirteen-year-old medieval.

In fact, Sura Vinh was far more awed than patronizing. Pham remembered their last conversation before he took his first turn in a coldsleep coffin. Sura had been calibrating the radiative coolers, checking the hypothermia drugs. "We'll come out almost together, Pham, me a hundred Ksec before you. I'll be here to help." She smiled and he could feel her gaze gently searching in him. "Don't worry."

Pham made some flippant remark, but of course she saw the uneasiness in him. She spoke of other things as he slipped into the coffin, a running monologue of their plans and daydreams, what they would begin when they finally reached Namqem. And then it was time, and she hesitated. She leaned down and kissed him lightly on the lips. Her smile turned faintly teasing, but she was mocking herself as much as him: "Sleep well, sweet prince."

And then she was gone, and the drugs were taking effect. It didn't feel cold at all. His last thoughts were a strange floating back across his past. During Pham's childhood on Canberra, his father had been a faraway figure. His own brothers had been lethal threats to his existence. Cindi, he had lost Cindi before he ever really understood. But for Sura Vinh. . .he had the feeling of a grown child for a loving parent, the feeling of a man for his woman, the feeling of a human being for a dear friend.

In some fundamental sense, Sura Vinh had been all those things. For much of her long life, Sura Vinh had seemed to be his friend. And even though she was ultimately his betrayer-still, there at the beginning, Sura Vinh had been a woman good and true.

Someone was shaking him gently, waving a hand in his face. "Hey, Trinli! Pham! Are you still with us?" It was Jau Xin, and he looked genuinely concerned.

"Ungh, yes, yes. I'm fine."

"You sure?" Xin watched him for several seconds, then drifted back to his seat. "I had an uncle who went all gla.s.sy-eyed like you just did. Tas a stroke, and he-"

"Yeah, well I'm fine. Never better." Pham put the bl.u.s.ter back in his voice. "I was just thinking, that's all."

The claim provoked diversionary laughter all round the table. "Thinking. A bad habit, Pham, old boy!" After a few moments, their concern faded. Pham listened attentively now, occasionally injecting loud opinions.

In fact, invasive daydreaming had been a feature of his personality since at least his leaving the Canberra. He'd get totally wrapped up in memories or planning, and lose himself the way some people did in immersion videos. He'd screwed up at least one deal because of it. From the corner of his eye, he could see that Qiwi was gone. Yes, the girl's childhood had been much like his, and maybe that accounted for her imagination and drive now. In fact, he had often wondered if the Strentmannians' crazy childrearing was based on stories of Pham's time on the Reprise. Reprise. At least when he had reached his destination, things got better. Poor Qiwi had found only death and deception here. But she still kept going. . . . At least when he had reached his destination, things got better. Poor Qiwi had found only death and deception here. But she still kept going. . . .

"We're getting good translations now." Trud Silipan was back on the Spiders. "I'm in charge of Reynolt's translator zipheads." Trud was more like an attendant than a manager, but no one pointed that out. "I tell you, any day now we'll start getting information about what the Spiders' original civilization was like."

"I don't know, Trud. Everyone says this must be a fallen colony. But if the Spiders are elsewhere in s.p.a.ce, how come we don't hear their radio?"

Pham: "Look. We've been over this before. Arachna must be a colony world. This system is just too hostile for life to start naturally."

And someone else: "Maybe the creatures don't have a Qeng Ho." Chuckles went round the table.

"No, there'd still be plenty of radio noise. We'd hear them."

"Maybe the rest of them are really far away, like the Perseus Mumbling-"

"Or maybe they're so advanced they don't use radio. We only noticed these guys because they're starting over." It was an old, old argument, part of a mystery that extended back to the Age of Failed Dreams. More than anything else it was what had drawn the human expeditions to Arachna. It was certainly what had drawn Pham.

And indeed, Pham had already found Something New, something so powerful that the origin of the Spiders was now a peripheral issue for him. Pham had found Focus. With Focus, the Emergents could convert their brightest people into dedicated machines of thought. A dud like Trud Silipan could get effective translations at the touch of a key. A monster like Tomas Nau could have eyes unresting. Focus gave the Emergents a power that no one had ever had before, subtlety that surpa.s.sed any machine and patience that surpa.s.sed any human. That was one of the Failed Dreams-but they had achieved it.

Watching Silipan pontificate, Pham realized that the next stage in his plan had finally arrived. The low-level Emergents had accepted Pham Trinli. Nau tolerated, even humored him, thinking he might be an unknowing window on the Qeng Ho military mind. It was time to learn a lot more about Focus. Learn from Silipan, from Reynolt. . .someday learn the technical side of the thing.

Pham had tried to build a true civilization across all of Human s.p.a.ce. For a few brief centuries it had seemed he might succeed. In the end, he had been betrayed. But Pham had long ago realized that the betrayal had been just the overt failure. What Sura and the others did to him at Brisgo Gap had been inevitable. An interstellar empire covers so much s.p.a.ce, so much time. The goodness and justice of such a thing is not enough. You need an edge.

Pham Nuwen raised his bulb of Diamonds and Ice and drank an unnoticed toast, to the lessons of the past and the promise of the future. This time he would do things right.

EIGHTEEN.

Ezr Vinh's first two years after the ambush were spread across nearly eight years of objective time. Almost like a good Qeng Ho captain, Tomas Nau was pacing their duty time to match local developments. Qiwi and her crews were out of coldsleep more than any, but even they were slowing down.

Anne Reynolt kept her astrophysicists busy, too. OnOff continued to settle along the light curve that had been seen in previous centuries; to a lay observer, it looked like a normal, hydrogen-eating sun, complete with sunspots. At first, she held the other academics to a lower duty cycle, awaiting the resumption of Spider activity.

Military radio transmissions were heard from Arachna less than one day after the Relight, even while steam-storms churned the surface. Apparently, the Off phase of the sun had interrupted some local war. Within a year or two, there were dozens of transmission sites on two continents. Every two centuries these creatures had to rebuild their surface structures almost from the foundations up, but apparently they were very good at it. When gaps showed in the cloud cover, the s.p.a.cers caught sight of new roads, towns.

By the fourth year there were two thousand transmission points, the cla.s.sical fixed-station model. Now Trixia Bonsol and the other linguists went to a heavier duty cycle. For the first time they had continuous audio to study.

When their Watches matched-and they often did now-Ezr visited Trixia Bonsol every day. At first, Trixia was more remote than ever. She didn't seem to hear him; the Spider talk flooded her workroom. The sounds were a squeaking shrillness that changed from day to day as Trixia and the other Focused linguists determined where in the acoustic spectrum the sense of Spider talk was hidden, and devised convenient representations, both auditory and visual, for its study. Eventually, Trixia had a usable data representation.

And then the translations really began. Reynolt's Focused translators grabbed everything they could get, producing thousands of words of semi-intelligible text per day. Trixia was the best. That was obvious from the beginning. It was her work with the physics texts that had been the original breakthrough, and it was she who melded that written language with the language spoken in two-thirds of the radio broadcasts. Even compared to the Qeng Ho linguists, Trixia Bonsol excelled; how proud she would be if only she could know. "She's indispensable." Reynolt pa.s.sed sentence with her typical flat affect, free of both praise and sadism, a statement of fact. Trixia Bonsol would get no early out, as Hunte Wen had.

Vinh tried to read everything the translators produced. At first it was typical of raw field linguistics, where each sentence consisted of dozens of pointers to alternative meanings, alternative parsings. After a few Msecs, the translations were almost readable. There were living beings down there on Arachna, and these were their words.

Some of the Focused linguists never got beyond the annotated-style translations. They were caught in the lower levels of meaning and fought any attempt to capture the spirit of the aliens. Maybe that was enough. For one thing, they learned that the Spiders had no knowledge of any previous civilization: "We're seeing no mention of a golden age of technology."

Nau looked at Reynolt skeptically. "That's suspicious in itself. Even on Old Earth, there were at least myths of a lost past." And if ever there were an origin world, it was Old Earth.

Reynolt shrugged. "I'm telling you that any mention of past technical civilizations is below the plausible background level. For instance, as far as we can tell, archeology is considered an insignificant academic pursuit"-not the world-creating frenzy of the typical fallen colony.

"Well, Plague take it," said Ritser Brughel. "If there's nothing for these guys to dig up, our payoff is just about c.r.a.p."

Pity you didn't think of that before you came,thought Ezr.

Nau looked sour and surprised, but he disagreed with Brughel: "We've still got Dr. Li's results." His glance flickered across the Qeng Ho at the foot of the table, and Ezr was sure that something else pa.s.sed through the Emergent's mind: We've still got a Qeng Ho fleet library, andPeddlers to explore it for us. We've still got a Qeng Ho fleet library, andPeddlers to explore it for us.

Trixia let Ezr touch her now, sometimes to comb her hair, sometimes just to pat her shoulder. Maybe he had spent so much time in her workroom that she thought of him as a piece of furniture, as safe as any other voice-activated machine. Trixia normally worked with a head-up display now; sometimes that gave the comforting illusion that she was actually looking at him. She would even answer his questions, as long as they stayed within the scope of her Focus and did not interrupt her conversations with her equipment and the other translators.

Much of the time, Trixia sat in the semidarkness, listening and speaking her translations at the same time. Several of the translators worked in that mode, scarcely more than automatons. Trixia was different, Vinh liked to think: like the others, she a.n.a.lyzed and rea.n.a.lyzed, but not to insert a dozen extra interpretations beneath every syntactic structure. Trixia's translations seemed to reach for the meaning as it was in the minds of the speakers, in minds for which the Spider world was a normal, familiar place. Trixia Bonsol's translations were. . .art.

Art was not what Anne Reynolt was looking for. At first she had only little things to complain about. The translators chose an alternative orthography for their output; they represented the x x and and q q glyphs with digraphs. It made their translations look very quaint. Fortunately, Trixia wasn't the first to use the bizarre scheme. Unfortunately, she originated far too much of the questionable novelty. glyphs with digraphs. It made their translations look very quaint. Fortunately, Trixia wasn't the first to use the bizarre scheme. Unfortunately, she originated far too much of the questionable novelty.

One terrible day, Reynolt threatened to bar Ezr from Trixia's workroom-that is, from Trixia's life. "Whatever you're doing, Vinh, it's messing her up. She's giving me figurative translations. Look at these names: 'Sherkaner Underhill,' 'Jaybert Landers.' She's throwing away complications that all the translators agree on. In other places she's making up nonsense syllables."

"She's doing just what she should be doing, Reynolt. You've been working with automatons too long." One thing about Reynolt: Though she was cra.s.s even by Emergent standards, she never seemed vindictive. She could even be argued with. But if she barred him from seeing Trixia . . .

Reynolt stared at him for a moment. "You're no linguist."

"I'm Qeng Ho. To make our way, we've had to understand the heart of thousands of human cultures, and a couple of nonhuman ones. You people have mucked around this small end of Human s.p.a.ce, with languages based on our broadcasts. There are languages that are enormously different."

"Yes. That's why her grotesque simplifications are not acceptable."

"No! You need people who truly understand the other side's minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens' differences. So Trixia's Spider names look silly. But this 'Accord' group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language."

"Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spider talk merges given names and surnames, that interphonation trick."

"I'm telling you, what Trixia is doing is fine. I'll bet the given names are from older and related languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them."

"Yes, and that's the worst of all. Some of this looks like bits of Ladille or Aminese. These Ladille units-'hours,' 'inches,' 'minutes'-they just make for awkward reading."

Ezr had his own problems with the crazy Ladille units, but he wasn't going to admit that to Reynolt. "I'm sure Trixia sees things that relate to her central translation the way Aminese and Ladille relate to the Nese you and I speak."

Reynolt was silent for a long moment, vacantly staring. Sometimes that meant that the discussion was over, and she had just not bothered to dismiss him. Other times it meant that she was trying very hard to understand. "So you're saying that she's achieving a higher level of translation, giving us insight by trading on our own self-awareness."

It was a typical Reynolt a.n.a.lysis, awkward and precise. "Yes! That's it. You still want the translations with all the pointers and exceptions and caveats, since our understanding is still evolving. But the heart of good trading is having a gut feel for the other side's needs and expectations."

Reynolt had bought the explanation. In any case, Nau liked the simplifications, even the Ladille quaintness. As time pa.s.sed, the other translators adopted more and more of Trixia's conventions. Ezr doubted if any of the unFocused Emergents were really competent to judge the translations. And despite his own confident talk, Ezr wondered more and more: Trixia's meta-trans of the Spiders was too much like the Dawn Age history he had pushed at her just before the ambush. That might seem alien to Nau and Brughel and Reynolt, but it was Ezr's specialty and he saw too many suspicious coincidences.

Trixia consistently ignored the physical nature of the Spiders. Maybe this was just as well, considering the loathing that some humans felt for spiders. But the creatures were were radically nonhuman in appearance, more alien in form and life cycle than any intelligence yet encountered by Humankind. Some of their limbs had the function of human jaws, and they had nothing exactly like hands and fingers, instead using their large number of legs to manipulate objects. These differences were all but invisible in Trixia's translations. There was an occasional reference to "a pointed hand" (perhaps the stiletto shape that a foreleg could fold into) or to midhands and forehands-but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen translations that were this soft, but those had been done by experts with decades of face-to-face experience with the Customer culture. radically nonhuman in appearance, more alien in form and life cycle than any intelligence yet encountered by Humankind. Some of their limbs had the function of human jaws, and they had nothing exactly like hands and fingers, instead using their large number of legs to manipulate objects. These differences were all but invisible in Trixia's translations. There was an occasional reference to "a pointed hand" (perhaps the stiletto shape that a foreleg could fold into) or to midhands and forehands-but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen translations that were this soft, but those had been done by experts with decades of face-to-face experience with the Customer culture.

Children's radio programming-at least that's what Trixia thought it was-had been invented on the Spider world. She translated the show's t.i.tle as "The Children's Hour of Science," and currently it was their best source of insight about the Spiders. The radio show was an ideal combination of science language-which the humans had made good progress on-and the colloquial language of everyday culture. No one knew if it was really aimed at schooling children or simply entertaining them. Conceivably, it was remedial education for military conscripts. Yet Trixia's t.i.tle caught on, and that colored everything that followed with innocence and cuteness. Trixia's Arachna seemed like something from a Dawn Age fairy tale. Sometimes when Ezr had spent a long day with her, when she had not spoken a word to him, when her Focus was so narrow that it denied all humanity. . .sometimes he wondered if these translations might be the Trixia of old, trapped in the most effective slavery of all time, and still reaching out for hope. The Spider world was the only place her Focus allowed her to gaze upon. May be she was distorting what she heard, creating a dream of happiness in the only way that was left to her.

NINETEEN.

It was in the midphase of the sun, and Princeton had recovered much of its beauty. In the cooler times ahead, there would be much more construction, the open theaters, the Palace of the Waning Years, the University's arboreta. But by 60//19, the street plan of generations past was fully in place, the central business section was complete, and the University held cla.s.ses all the year round.

In other ways, the year 60//19 was different from 59//19, and very different from the tenth year of all generations before that. The world had entered the Age of Science. An airfield covered the river lowlands that had been farm paddies in past eras. Radio masts grew from the city's highest hills; at night, their far-red marker lights could be seen for miles.

By 60//19 most of the Accord's cities were similarly changed, as were the great cities of Tiefstadt and the Kindred, and to a lesser degree the cities of poorer nations. But even by the standards of the new age, Princeton was a very special place. There were things happening here that didn't show on the visible landscape, yet were the seeds of greater revolution.

Hrunkner Unnerby flew in to Princeton one rainy spring morning. An airport taxi drove him from the riverfront up through the center of town. Unnerby had grown up in Princeton and his old construction company had been here. He arrived before most shops' opening time; street cleaners scuttled this way and that around his taxi. A cool drizzle left the shops and the trees with glints of a thousand colors. Hrunkner liked the old downtown, where many of the stone foundations had survived more than three or four generations. Even the new concrete and the brick upper stories followed designs from before the time of any living person.

Out of the downtown, they climbed through new housing. This was a former Royal property that the government had sold to finance the Great War-the conflict the new generation was already calling simply the War with the Tiefers. Some parts of the new district were instant slums; others-the higher viewpoints-were elegant estates. The taxi trundled back and forth along the switchbacks, rising slowly toward the highest spot in the new tract. The top was obscured by dripping ferns, but here and there he glimpsed outbuildings. Gates opened silently and without apparent attendants. Hunh. There was a b.l.o.o.d.y palace up ahead.

Sherkaner Underhill stood by the parking circle at the end, looking quite out of place beside the grand entrance. The rain was just a comfortable mist, but Underhill popped open an umbrella as he walked out to greet Unnerby.

"Welcome, Sergeant! Welcome! All the years I've been after you to visit my little hillhouse, and finally you're here."

Hrunkner shrugged.

"I have so much to show you. . .starting with two small but important items." He tipped back the umbrella. After a moment, two tiny heads peeked up from the fur on his back. The two were babies, holding tight to their father. They could be no older than normal children in the early Bright, just old enough to be cute. "The little girl is Rhapsa and the boy is Hrunkner."

Unnerby stepped forward, trying to seem casual. They probably namedthe child Hrunkner out of friendship. G.o.d in deepest earth. They probably namedthe child Hrunkner out of friendship. G.o.d in deepest earth. "Very pleased to meet you." In the best of times, Unnerby had no way with children-training new hires was the closest he'd ever come to raising them. Hopefully, that would excuse his unease. "Very pleased to meet you." In the best of times, Unnerby had no way with children-training new hires was the closest he'd ever come to raising them. Hopefully, that would excuse his unease.

The babies seemed to sense his distaste, and retreated shyly from sight. "

Never mind," said Sherkaner, in that oblivious way of his. "They'll come out and play once we're indoors."

Sherkaner led him inside, talking all the way about how much he had to show him, how good it was that Hrunkner was finally visiting. The years had changed Underhill, physically at least. Gone was the painful leanness; he had been through several molts. The fur on his back was deep and paternal, strange to see on anyone in this phase of the sun. The tremor in his head and forebody was a little worse than Unnerby remembered.

They walked through a foyer big enough for a hotel, and down a wide spiral of steps that looked out upon wing after wing of Sherkaner's "little hillhouse." There were plenty of other people here, servants perhaps, though they didn't wear the livery that the super-rich usually demanded. In fact, the place had the utilitarian feel of corporate or government property. Unnerby interrupted the other's nonstop chatter with, "This is all a front, isn't it, Underhill? The King never sold this hill at all, just transferred it." To the Intelligence Service.

"No, really. I do own the ground; I bought it myself. But, um, I do a lot of consulting, and Victory-I mean Accord Intelligence-decided that security was best served by setting up the labs right here. I have some things to show you."

"Yeah. Well, that's the point of my visit, Sherk. I don't think you're working on the right things. You've pushed the Crown into going all out for-I a.s.sume we can talk freely here?"

"Yes, yes, of course."

Ordinarily, Unnerby wouldn't have accepted such a casual a.s.sertion, but he was beginning to realize how thoroughly secure the building was. There was plenty of Sherkaner design, the logarithmic spiral of the main rooms for instance, but there was also Victory's touch, the-guards, he now realized-lurking everywhere, the crisply clean nature of the carpets and walls. This place was probably as safe as Unnerby's labs inside Lands Command. "Okay. You've pushed the Crown into going all out for atomic power. I'm managing more men and equipment than a billionaire, including several people almost as smart as you are." In fact, though Hrunkner Unnerby was still a sergeant, his job was about as far from that rank as one could get. His life these days was beyond his wildest contractor's dream.

"Good, good. Victory has a lot of faith in you, you know." He led his guest into a large and peculiar room. There were bookcases and a desk, all overflowing with reports, randomly piled books, and notepaper. But the bookcases were fastened to a cobblie jungle gym, and children's books were mixed with the arcana. His two babies hopped from his back and scuttled up the gym. Now they peered down upon them from the ceiling. Sherkaner pushed books and magazines off a lower perch and waved for Unnerby to seat himself. Thank G.o.d he didn't try to change the subject.