A Deepness in the Sky (4 page)

"It...it was several little things, and—" She reached out to catch his hand. "You know I have an ear for languages." Another quick smile. "Their dialect of Nese is so close to your broadcast standard that it's clear they've bootstrapped off the Qeng Ho Net."

"Sure. That all fits with their claims. They're a young culture, crawling back from a bad fall."Will I end up having to defend them? The Emergent offer had been reasonable, almost generous. It was the sort of thing that made any good Trader a little cautious. But Trixia had seen somethingelse to worry about.

"Yes, but having a common language makes a lot of things difficult to disguise. I heard a dozen authoritarian turns of speech—and they didn't seem to be fossil usages. The Emergents are accustomed to owning people, Ezr."

"You mean slaves? This is a high-tech civilization, Trixia. Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart."

She squeezed his hand abruptly, not angry, not playful, but intense in a way he'd never seen with her before. "Yes, yes. But we don't know all their kinks. We do know they play rough. I had a whole evening of listening to that reddish-blond fellow sitting beside you, and the pair that were on my right. The word ‘trade' does not come easily to them. Exploitation is the only relationship they can imagine with the Spiders."

"Hmm." Trixia was like this. Things that slipped past him could make such a difference to her. Sometimes they seemed trivial even after she explained them. But sometimes her explanation was like a bright light revealing things he had never guessed. "...I don't know, Trixia. You know we Qeng Ho can sound pretty, um, arrogant when the customers are out of earshot."

Trixia looked away from him for a second, stared out at strange quaint rooms that had been her family's home on Triland. "Qeng Ho arrogance turned my world upside down, Ezr. Your Captain Park busted open the school system, opened up the Forestry....And it was just a side effect."

"We didn't force anyone—"

"I know. You didn't force anyone. The Forestry wanted a stake in this mission, and delivering certain products was your price of admission." She was smiling oddly. "I'm not complaining, Ezr. Without Qeng Ho arrogance I would never have been allowed into the Forestry's screening program. I wouldn't have my doctorate, and I wouldn't be here. You Qeng Hoare gougers, but you are also one of the nicer things that has happened to my world."

Ezr had been in coldsleep till the last year at Triland. The Customer details weren't that clear to him, and before tonight Trixia had not been especially talkative about them. Hmm. Only one marriage proposal per Msec; he had promised her no more, but...He opened his mouth to say—

"Wait, you! I'm not done. The reason for saying all this now is that I have to convince you: There is arrogance and arrogance, and I can tell the difference. The people at that dinner sounded more like tyrants than traders."

"What about the servers? Did they look like downtrodden serfs?"

"...No...more like employees. I know that doesn't fit. But we aren't seeing all the Emergents' people. Maybe the victims are elsewhere. But either through confidence or blindness, Tomas Nau left their pain posted all over the walls." She glared at his questioning look. "The paintings, damn it!"

Trixia had made a slow stroll of leaving the banquet hall, admiring each painting in turn. They were beautiful landscapes, either of groundside locations or very large habitats. Every one was surreal in lighting and geometry, but precise down to the detail of individual threads of grass. "Normal, happy people didn't make those pictures."

Ezr shrugged. "It looked to me like they were all done by the same person. They're so good, I'll bet they're reproductions of classics, like Deng's Canberran castlescapes." A manic-depressive contemplating his barren future. "Great artists are often crazy and unhappy."

"Spoken like a true Trader!"

He put his other hand across hers. "Trixia, I'm not trying to argue with you. Until this banquet, I was the untrusting one."

"And you still are, aren't you?" The question was intense, with no sign of playful intent.

"Yes," though not as much as Trixia, and not for the same reasons. "It's just a little too reasonable of the Emergents to share half the haul from their heavy lifters." There must have been some hard bargaining behind that. In theory, the academic brainpower that the Qeng Ho had brought was worth as much as a few heavy lifters, but the equation was subtle and difficult to argue. "I'm just trying to understand what you saw, and what I missed....Okay, suppose things are as dangerous as you see them. Don't you think Captain Park and the Committee are on to that?"

"So what do they think now? Watching your fleet officers on the return taxi, I got the feeling people are pretty mellow about the Emergents now."

"They're just happy we got a deal. I don't know what the people on the Trading Committee think."

"You could find out, Ezr. If this banquet has fooled them, you could demand some backbone. I know, I know: You're an apprentice; there are rules and customs and blah blah blah. But your Familyowns this expedition!"

Ezr hunched forward. "Just a part of it." This was also the first time she'd ever made anything of the fact. Until now both of them—Ezr, at least—had been afraid of acknowledging that difference in status. They shared the deep-down fear that each might simply be taking advantage of the other. Ezr Vinh's parents and his two aunts owned about one-third of the expedition: two ramscoops and three landing craft. As a whole, the Vinh.23 Family owned thirty ships scattered across a dozen enterprises. The voyage to Triland had been a side investment, meriting only a token Family member. A century or three down the line he would be back with his family. By then, Ezr Vinh would be ten or fifteen years older. He looked forward to that reunion, to showing his parents that their boy had made good. In the meantime, he was years short of being able to throw his weight around. "Trixia, there's a difference between owning and managing, especially in my case. If my parents were on this expedition, yes, they would have a lot of clout. But they've been ‘There and Back Again.' I am far more an apprentice than an owner." And he had the humiliations to prove it. One thing about a proper Qeng Ho expedition, there wasn't much nepotism; sometimes just the opposite.

Trixia was silent for a long moment, her eyes searching back and forth across Ezr's face. What next? Vinh remembered well Aunt Filipa's grim advice about women who attach themselves to rich young Traders, who draw them in and then think to run their lives—and worse, run the Family's proper business. Ezr was nineteen, Trixia Bonsol twenty-five. She might think she could simply make demands.Oh Trixia, please no.

Finally she smiled, a gentler, smaller smile than usual. "Okay, Ezr. Do what you must...but a favor? Think on what I've said." She turned, reaching up to touch his face and gently stroke it. Her kiss was soft, tentative.

TWO

The Brat was waiting in ambush outside Ezr's quarters.

"Hey, Ezr, I watched you last night." That almost stopped him.She'stalking about the banquet. The Trading Committee had piped it back to the fleet.

"Sure, Qiwi, you saw me on the vid. Now you're seeing me in person." He opened his door, stepped inside. Somehow the Brat stuck so close behind that now she was inside too. "So what are you doing here?"

Qiwi was a genius at taking questions the way she wanted them: "We got the same scut-work shift starting in two thousand seconds. I thought we could go down to the bactry together, trade gossip."

Vinh dived into the back room, this time shutting her out. He changed into work fatigues. Of course, the Brat was still waiting when he emerged.

He sighed. "I don't have any gossip."Damned if I'll repeat what Trixiasaid.

Qiwi grinned triumphantly. "Well,I do. C'mon." She opened the room's outer door and gave him an elegant zero-gee bow out into the public corridor. "I wanna compare notes with you about what you saw, but really, I bet I got a lot more. The Committee had three povs, including at the entrance—better views than you had." She bounced down the hall with him, explaining how often she had reviewed the videos, and telling of all the people she had gossiped with since.

Vinh had first met Qiwi Lin Lisolet back in pre-Flight, in Trilander space. She'd been an eight-year-old bundle of raw obnoxiousness. And for some reason she'd chosen him as the target of her attention. After a meal or training session, she'd rush up behind him and slug him in the shoulder—and the angrier he got, the more she seemed to like it. One good punch returned would have changed her whole outlook. But you can't slug an eight-year-old. She was nine years short of the mandatory crew minimum. The place for children was before voyages and after—not in crews, especially crews bound for desolate space. But Qiwi's mother owned twenty percent of the expedition....The Lisolet.17 Family was truly matriarchal, originally from Strentmann, far away across Qeng Ho space. They were strange in both appearance and custom. A lot of rules must have been broken, but little Qiwi had ended up on the crew. She had spent more years of the voyage awake than any but the Watch crew. A large part of her childhood had passed between the stars, with just a few adults around, often not even her own parents. Just thinking of that was enough to cool a lot of Vinh's irritation. The poor little girl. And not so little anymore. Qiwi must be fourteen years old. And now her physical attacks had been mostly replaced by verbal ones—a good thing considering the Strentmannian high-grav physique.

Now the two were descending through the main axis of the temp. "Hey Raji, how's business?" Qiwi waved and grinned at every second passerby. In the Msecs before the Emergents' arrival, Captain Park had unfrozen almost half of the fleet crew, enough to manage all vehicles and weapons, with hot backups. Fifteen hundred people wouldn't be more than a large party in his parents' temp. Here, it was a crowd, even if many were away on shipboard during duty time. With this many people, you really noticed that the quarters were temporary, new partitions being inflated for this crew and that. The main axis was nothing but the meeting corners of four very large balloons. The surfaces rippled occasionally when four or five people had to slip by at once.

"I don't trust the Emergents, Ezr. After all the generous talk, they'll slit our throats."

Vinh gave an irritated grunt. "So how come you're smiling so much?"

They floated past a clear section of fabric—a real window, not wallpaper. Beyond was the temp's park. It was barely more than a large bonsai, actually, but probably held more open space and living things than were in all the Emergents' sterile habitat. Qiwi's head twisted around and for a short moment she was quiet. Living plants and animals were about the only things that could do that to her. Her father was Fleet Life-Support Officer—and a bonsai artist known across all of near Qeng Ho space.

Then she seemed to startle back to the present. Her smile returned, supercilious. "Because we're the Qeng Ho, if we only stop to remember the fact! We've got thousands of years of sneakiness on these newcomers. ‘Emergents' my big toe! They're where they are now from listening to the public part of the Qeng Ho Net. Without the Net, they'd still be squatting in their own ruins."

The passage narrowed, curving down into a cusp. Behind and above them, the sounds of crew were muted by the swell of wall fabric. This was the innermost bladder of the temp. Besides the spar and power pile, it was the only part that was absolutely necessary: the bactry pit.

The duty here was scut work, about as low as things could get, cleaning the bacterial filters below the hydro ponds. Down here, the plants didn't smell so nice. In fact, robust good health was signaled by a perfectly rotting stench. Most of the work could be done by machines, but there were judgment calls that eluded the best automation, and that no one had ever bothered to make remotes for. In a way, it was a responsible position. Make a dumb mistake and a bacterial strain might get across the membrane into the upper tanks. The food would taste like vomit, and the smell could pass into the ventilator system. But even the most terrible error probably wouldn't kill anyone—there were still the bactries on the ramscoops, all kept in isolation from one another.

So this was a place to learn, ideal by the standards of harsh teachers: It was tricky; it was physically uncomfortable; and a mistake could cause embarrassment that would be very hard to live down.

Qiwi signed up for extra duty here. She claimed to love the place. "My papa says you gotta start with the smallest living things, before you can handle the big ones." She was a walking encyclopedia about bacteria, the entwined metabolic pathways, the sewage-like bouquets that corresponded to different combinations, the characteristics of the strains that would be damaged by any human contact (the blessed ones whose stink they need never smell).

Ezr came close to making two mistakes in the first Ksec. He caught them, of course, but Qiwi noticed. Normally she would have ragged him endlessly about the errors. But today Qiwi was caught up in scheming about the Emergents. "You know why we didn't bring any heavy lifters?"

Their two largest landers could hoist a thousand tonnes from surface to orbit. Given time, they would have had all the volatiles and ore they needed. Of course, time was what the Emergent arrival had taken from them. Ezr shrugged, and kept his eyes on the sample he was drawing. "I know the rumors."

"Ha. You don't need rumors. You'd know the truth with a little arithmetic. Fleet Captain Park guessed we might have company. He brought the minimum of landers and habs. And he brought lots and lots of guns and nukes."

"Maybe."Certainly.

"The trouble is, the damn Emergents are so close, they brought a whole lot more—and still arrived on our heels."

Ezr made no reply, but that didn't matter.

"Anyway. I've been tracking gossip. We've got to be really, really careful." And she was off into military tactics and speculations about the Emergents' weapons systems. Qiwi's mother was Deputy Fleet Captain, but she was an armsman, too. AStrentmannian armsman. Most of the Brat's time in transit had been spent on math and trajectories and engineering. The bactry and the bonsai were her father's influence. She could oscillate between bloodthirsty armsman, wily trader, and bonsai artist—all in the space of a few seconds. How had her parents ever thought to marry? And what a lonely, messed-up kid they produced. "So we could beat the Emergents in a straight-out fight," said Qiwi. "And they know that. That's why they're being so nice. The thing to do is play along with them; we need their heavy lifters. Afterwards, if they live up to the agreement, they may be rich but we'll be much richer. Those jokers couldn't sell air to a tankless temp.If things stay square, we'll come out of this operation with effective control."