A Deepness in the Sky (60 page)

"See! That's the real reason you're Reynolt's favorite. You know what fantasies the Spiders might believe. When the time comes to take over, that will be important."

"When the time comes..." Jau Xin gave a lopsided smile. On the far wall, by the Watch Chart, Benny had a window on the Coming-Out Party Betting Pool. Guessing just when they would come out of hiding, when the Exile would end—that was the eternal topic of parlor debate. "It's been more than thirty real years since the sun relighted. I'm outside a lot, you know, almost as much as Qiwi Lisolet and her crews. These days, the sun is dimming down. We have just a few years till it's dead again. The Spiders have themselves a deadline. I'm betting they'll be into the Information Age in less than ten years."

"No, not far enough for us to make a smooth takeover," said Arlo.

"Okay. But in the end, other things may force our hand. The Spiders have the beginnings of a space program. In ten years, our operations—our presence here at L1—may be impossible to disguise."

Trud: "So? They get too uppity, we whack 'em."

Jau: "And cut our own throats, man."

"You're both talking nonsense," said Arlo. "I'll bet we have fewer than ten nukes left. Seems we used all the rest on each other a while back—"

"We have directed-energy weapons."

"Yes, if we were in close orbit. I tell you, we couldbluff a good game, but—"

"We could drop our wrecked starships on the buggers."

Ezr exchanged a glance with Rita Liao. This was the argument that sent her into full froth. She—and Jau and most of the people round the table—thought of the Spiders as people. That was Trixia's triumph. The Emergents, at least outside the Podmaster class, were uncomfortable with the notion of megamurder. In any case, Jau Xin was certainly right: Whether or not the Emergents had the firepower, the whole object of the Lurk was to create a customer who could put the mission back in business. Blowing them up made sense only to crazies like Ritser Brughel.

Ezr leaned back, out of the argument. He had seen Pham's name on the Watch Chart; just a few more days and they would have their first real meeting.Take it slow and patient, no rush. Okay. He hoped the Debating Society would move on to something more interesting, but even this nonsense was a pleasant familiar buzz. Not for the first time, Ezr realized this was almost like having family, a family that argued endlessly about problems that never seemed to change. He got along with even the Emergents, and they with him. Almost like a normal life....He looked through the lattice of z-vines that filled the spaces around them. The flowers actually smelled faintly—though nothing like that stink-lacquer that Hunte tried before. Ah. A clear view opened through the flowers and leaves, to Benny's station on the floor of the parlor. He started to wave to Benny. Maybe he could stomach some real food, after all. Then he saw a flash of checkered pants and fractille blouse.

Qiwi.

She and Benny were deep in negotiation. Benny pointed at the crappy section of wallpaper that stretched across the parlor's bottom wall. Qiwi nodded, consulting some sort of list. Then she seemed to feel his gaze. She turned, and waved at Ezr's group up by the ceiling.She is so beautiful. Ezr looked away, his face suddenly chill. Once Qiwi had been the brat who irritated him beyond measure. Once Qiwi had seemed a betrayer, abusing the zipheads. And once Ezr had hit her and hit her....Ezr remembered the rage, howgood it felt to get some revenge for Jimmy Diem and Trixia Bonsol. But Qiwi was no betrayer; Qiwi was a victim more than she knew. If Pham was right about mindscrub—and he must be; the horror fit the facts too well—then Qiwi was a victim almost beyond human imagination. And in beating Qiwi, Ezr had learned something about himself. He had learned that Ezr Vinh's decency must be a shallow thing. That self-knowledge was something he could keep tucked away most of the time. Maybe he could still do good, even if at bottom he was something vile.... But when he actually saw Qiwi, and when she saw him...then it was impossible to forget what he had done.

"Hi Qiwi!" Rita had noticed Qiwi's wave. "Got a second? We want you to settle something for us."

Qiwi grinned. "Be right there." She turned back to Benny. He was nodding, handing her a bunch of paper favors. Then she came bouncing up the latticework of vines. She trailed Benny's net, filled with beer refills and more snacks. In effect, she was doing some of Benny's work for him. That was Qiwi for you. She was part of the underground economy, the hustlers that made things relatively comfortable here. Like Benny, she didn't hesitate to lend a hand, towork. And at the same time, she had the Podmaster's ear; she brought a softness to Nau's regime that Emergents like Jau Xin could not consciously admit. But you could see it in Jau and Rita's eyes; they were almost in awe of Qiwi Lisolet.

And she smiled at him. "Hi, Ezr. Benny figured you might want more." She slid the bucket into sticking contact with the table in front of him. Ezr nodded, not able to meet her gaze.

Rita was already babbling at her; maybe no one noticed his awkwardness. "Not to ask for inside news, Qiwi, but what's the latest estimate for our Coming-Out date?"

Qiwi smiled. "My guess? Twelve years at the outside. Spider progress with spaceflight may force our hand before that."

"Yeah." Rita slid a glance at Jau. "Well, we were wondering. Suppose we can't grab everything via their computer networks. Suppose we have to take sides, play one power block off against another. Who would we back?"

THIRTY-FIVE

Diamond One was more than two thousand meters long and nearly as wide, by far the largest of all the rocks in the pile. Over the years, the crystal directly beneath Hammerfest had been carved into a labyrinth of caves. The upper levels were the labs and offices. Below that were Tomas's private rooms. Below that was the latest addition to the inverted architecture: a lens-shaped void more than two hundred meters across. The making of it had worn out most of the thermal diggers, but Qiwi had not objected; in fact, this had been partly her idea.

Their three human forms were almost lost in the scale of the place. "So is this impressive, or is this impressive?" Qiwi asked, smiling at Tomas.

Nau was staring straight upward, his face slack with wonder. That didn't happen often. He hadn't noticed yet, but he'd lost his balance and was slowly falling over backwards. "I...yes. Even the huds mockup didn't do it justice."

Qiwi laughed, and patted him back toward vertical. "I confess. In the mockups I didn't show the lights." Actinic arcs were buried in the anechoic grooves of the ceiling. The lamps turned the sky into a coruscating gem. By tuning their output, almost any lighting effect could be obtained, but always tinged with rainbows.

On her right, Papa was also staring, but not with rapture, and not upward. Ali Lin was on his hands. He pretty much ignored the subtle hints of gravity as he poked at the pebble-textured surface the diggers had left in the diamond floor. "There's nothing living here, nothing at all." His face screwed up in a frown.

"It will be the largest park you've ever done, Papa. A blank slate for you to work on." The frown eased.We'll work on it together, Papa. You canteach me new things. This one should be big enough for real animals, maybe even the flying kittens. Those were more dream than memory, from the time Mama and Papa and Qiwi spent at the Trilander departure temp.

And Tomas said, "I'm so glad you pushed me on this, Qiwi. I just wanted a little better security and you've given me something wonderful." He sighed, smiled down at her. His hand brushed down her back to just above her hips.

"It'll be a large park, Tomas, even by Qeng Ho standards. Not the largest, but—"

"But it likely will be thebest. " He leaned past her to pat Ali on the shoulder.

"Yes."Yes, it likely will be the best. Papa had always been a premier parkbuilder. And now, for fifteen years of his lifetime he had been Focused on his specialty. Every year of that time had produced new wonders. His bonsais and microparks were already better than the finest of Namqem. Even the Focused Emergent biologists were as good as the Qeng Ho best, now that they had access to the fleet's life library.

And when the Exile is over, Papa, when you are finally free, then youwill truly know what wonders you have made.

Nau's glance swept back and forth across the empty, glittering cavern. He must be imaging some of the landscapes it might sustain—savannah, cool rain forest, meadowland in mountains. Even Ali's magic couldn't create more than one ecosystem at a time here, but there were choices....She smiled: "How would you like a lake?"

"What?"

"Code ‘wetwater,' in my design library." And Qiwi keyed her own huds to the design.

"Unh...you didn't tell me about this!"

Overlaid on the diamond reality of the cavern was one of Ali's forestland schemes—but now the center of the cavern was a lake that widened and widened into the distance till it reached island mountains that seemed kilometers away. A sailboat had just cast off from the arbored moorage down the hill from them.

Tomas was silent for a moment. "Lord. That's on my uncle's estate at North Paw. I spent summers there."

"I know. I got it from your biography."

"It's beautiful, Qiwi, even if it is impossible."

"Not impossible! We've got lots of water topside; this will be a good secondary storage for some of it." She waved at the distance, where the lake spread wide. "We dig out the far side of the cavern a little, and run the lake right out to the wall. We can scavenge enough wallpaper to make realistic far imagery." That might not be true. The video wallpaper from the wrecked ships had suffered considerable vacuum damage. It didn't matter. Tomas liked to wear huds, and they could paint the far scenery for anyone who did not participate in the imaging.

"That's not what I mean. We can't have a real lake, not in microgravity. Every little rockquake would send it crawling up the walls."

Qiwi let her smile grow broad. "That's the real surprise. I can do it, Tomas! We have thousands of servo valves from the wrecked starships, more than we can use for anything else. We put them at the bottom of the lake, and run them off a network of localizers. It would be easy to damp the water waves, keep the thing confined."

Tomas laughed. "You really like stabilizing the intrinsically unstable, don't you, Qiwi! Well...you did it for the rockpile, maybe you can do it here."

She shrugged. "Sure I can. With a restricted shoreline, I could even do it with Emergent localizers."

Tomas turned to look at her, and now she saw no visions before his eyes. He was back in the hard sterile world of the diamond cavern. But he had seen the wonder, and she knew she had pleased him. "It would be marvelous...a lot of resources, though, and a lot of work." Work by non-zipheads, he meant. Even Tomas didn't think of the Focused as real people.

"It won't get in the way of important things. The valves are scrap. The localizers are surplus. And people owe me lots of favors."

After a time, Nau led his woman and the ziphead back out of the cavern. Qiwi had surprised him once again, this time more spectacularly than usual. And damn. This was just another reason why they needed the localizers in Hammerfest. Reynolt's people still hadn't cleared the devices; just how complicated could that be?Leave it for later. Qiwi said they could get some kind of lake even with Emergent localizers.

They went back up through the lower levels, acknowledging the various salutes and waves of techs, both Emergent and former Qeng Ho. They dropped Ali Lin off in the garden park that was his workshop. Qiwi's father wasn't caged in the Attic honeycomb. In fact, his specialty demanded open spaces and living things. At least, that was how Tomas Nau presented the issue to Qiwi. It was plausible, and it meant the girl was not continually exposed to the usual face of Focused operations; that helped slow her inevitable slide toward understanding.

"You have to go over to the temp, Qiwi?"

"Yes, some errands. To see some friends." Qiwi had her trades to accomplish, her favors to collect.

"Okay." He swept her up in a kiss, visible the length of the office hall. No matter. "You did well, my love!"

"Thanks." Her smile was a dazzling thing. Over thirty years old, and Qiwi Lisolet still hung on his approval. "See you this evening."

She departed up the central shaft, pulling herself hand over hand faster and faster, all but rocketing past the other people in the shaft. Qiwi still practiced every day in a two-gee centrifuge, still practiced the martial killing arts. It was all that was left of her mother's influence, at least all that was visible. No doubt a lot of her driving energy was some sort of sublimated effort to please her mother.

Nau looked up, almost oblivious of the people coming down around him; they would stay out of his way. He watched her figure dwindle into the heights of the main shaft.

After Anne Reynolt, Qiwi was his most precious possession. But he had essentially inherited Reynolt; Qiwi Lin Lisolet was his personal triumph, a brilliant, unFocused person, working unstintingly for him for all these years. Owning her, manipulating her—it was a challenge that never got stale. And there was always an edge of danger. She had the strength and speed, at least, to kill with her hands. He hadn't understood that in the early years. But that was also before he had realized what a valuable thing she was.

Yes, she was his triumph, but Tomas Nau was realistic enough to know he'd been lucky, too. He had first possessed Qiwi at just the right age and context—when she was old enough to have absorbed a depth of Qeng Ho background, yet young enough to be molded by the Diem Massacre. In the first ten years of the Exile, she had seen through his lies only three times.

A little smile quirked his lips. Qiwi thought she was changinghim, that she had shown him how well the methods of freedom worked. Well, she was right. In the early years, allowing the underground economy had been part of the game he was playing with her, a temporary weakness. But the underground economy reallyworked. Even the Qeng Ho texts claimed that free markets should be meaningless in an environment as closed and limited as this. And yet, year by year, the Peddlers had made things better—even for operations that Nau would have required anyway. So now, when she assured him that people owed her favors, that they would work really hard to make the lake park—Pestilence, I really want that lake—Tomas Nau didn't laugh behind his hand at her. She was right: the people—even the Emergents—would do better on that park because they owed Qiwi than they would because Tomas Nau was Podmaster with the ultimate power to space them all.

Qiwi was a tiny figure at the very top of the shaft. She turned and waved. Nau waved back, and she disappeared to the side, down one of the taxi access tunnels.

Nau stood a moment longer, staring upward with a smile on his face. Qiwi had taught him the power of managed freedom. Uncle Alan and the Nauly clique had bequeathed him the power of Focused slaves. And the OnOff star...? The more they learned of the star and its planet, the more he had the awed conviction that there were miracles hiding here, maybe not the treasures they had expected, but much greater things. The biology, the physics, the star system's far galactic orbit...their combined implications were just beyond the analysts' comprehension, teasing at his intuition.

And in a few years, the Spiders would hand him an industrial ecology with which to exploit it all.

There had never been a place and a time in the histories of Humankind where so much opportunity had come to one man. Twenty-five years ago, a younger Tomas Nau had quailed before the uncertainties. But the years had passed, and step by step he had met the problems and mastered them. What came out of Arachna would be the power of a dynasty like none Humankind had ever seen. It would take time, perhaps another century or two, but he would scarcely be out of Qeng Ho middle age by the end of it. He could sweep the Emergent cliques aside. This end of Human Space would see the greatest empire in all the histories. The legend of Pham Nuwen would pale in the light that Tomas Nau would cast.

And Qiwi? He cast a final look upward. He hoped she would last through the end of the Exile. There were so many things she could help him with when they took the Spiders down. But the mask was fraying. Mindscrub was not perfect; Qiwi was catching on faster than in the early years. Without destroying large amounts of brain tissue, Anne could not eliminate what she called "residual neural weighting." And of course there were some contradictions that coldsleep amnesia could not plausibly cover. Eventually, even with the most skillful manipulation...How could he explain reneging on his promises of manumission? How could he explain the measures he would take against the Spiders, or the human breeding programs that would be necessary? No. Inevitably, but most regrettably, he would have to dispose of Qiwi. And yet, even then she could still serve him. Children by her would still be possible. Someday his reign would need heirs.

Qiwi pulled into Benny's parlor about two thousand seconds later. And it was Benny running things this Watch. Good. He was her favorite master of the parlor. They dickered for a moment over the new gear he wanted. "Lord, Benny! You need more wallpaper? There are other projects that could use some, you know." Like a certain park under Hammerfest.