A Deepness in the Sky (61 page)

Benny shrugged. "Get the Podmaster to allow consensual imaging, and I won't need wallpaper. But the stuff just wears out. See?" He waved at the floor, where the image of Arachna was a permanent fixture. She could see a storm system that would probably reach Princeton in a few Ksecs; certainly the display drivers were still alive. But she could also see the distortions and the colored smudges.

"Okay, we still have some to strip out of theInvisible Hand, but it'll cost you." Ritser Brughel would froth and shriek, even though he had no use for the wallpaper. Ritser regarded theHand as his private fiefdom. She looked at Benny's handwritten list, at the other items. The finished foods were all from the temp's bactry and ags—Gonle Fong would want to handle that. Volatiles and feedstock, aha. As usual, Benny was negotiating on the side for those, trying to short-circuit Gonle by going directly to the mining operation on the rockpile. For best friends, the two took their business competition awfully seriously.

At the edge of her vision, something moved. She glanced up. Over by the ceiling, Xin's gang was hanging out in its usual place. Ezr! An involuntary smile spread across Qiwi's face. He had turned from the others, was looking in her direction. She waved to him. Ezr's face seemed to close down, and he turned away. For a moment, a lot of old pain floated up in Qiwi's mind. Even now, when she saw him, there was always this quick, involuntary twinge of joy, like seeing a dear friend you have so much to say to. But the years had passed, and every time he turned away. She hadn't meant to harm Trixia Bonsol; she helped Tomas because he was a good man, a man who was doing his best to bring them through the Exile.

She wondered if Ezr would ever let her close enough to explain. Maybe. There were years to come. At Exile's end, when they had a whole civilization to help them and Trixia was returned to him—surely then he would forgive.

THIRTY-SIX

The space between the temp's outer skin and the habitable balloons was a buffer against blowouts. Over the years, various of Gonle Fong's farming rackets had used the space; a pressure loss would have killed some truffles or her experiments with Canberra flowers. Even now, Fong's ags occupied only a part of the dead space. Pham met Ezr Vinh well away from the little farm plots. Here the air was still and cold, and the only light was OnOff's dim glow seeping through the outer wall.

Pham hooked his foot under a wall stop and waited quietly. Earlier in the Watch, he had made sure that these volumes were well populated with localizers. They were scattered here and there on the walls. A few always floated in the air around him, though even in bright light they would have been scarcely more than dustmotes. And so, hiding here in the twilight, Pham was a one-man command post. He could hear and see from wherever he commanded—just now, the airgap between the balloons. Someone was approaching cautiously. At the back of his eyes he had vision now, almost as good as Qeng Hohuds. It was the Vinh boy, looking nervous and stealthy.

How old was Vinh now, thirty? Not really a kid anymore. But he still had that cast to his features, that serious manner...just like Sura. Not a person to trust, oh no. But hopefully a person he could use.

Vinh appeared to the naked eye, coming around the curve of the inner balloon. Pham raised a hand and the boy stopped, sucked in a breath of surprise. For all his caution, Vinh had almost passed Pham by, not noticing him floating in the inward notch of the wall fabric. "I—Hello." Vinh was whispering.

Pham floated out from the wall, to where the light of OnOff was a little better. "We meet at last," he said, giving the boy a lopsided smile.

"Y-yes. Truly." Ezr turned, looked at him for a long moment, and then gave—Lord!—a little bow. His Sura features spread into a shy smile. "It's strange to actually see you, not Pham Trinli."

"Hardly a visible difference."

"Oh sir, you don't know. When you are Trinli, all the little things are different. Here, even in this light, you look different. If Nau or Reynolt saw you for even ten seconds, they would know, too."

The kid had an overactive imagination. "Well, the only thing they're seeing for the next two thousand seconds is the lies my localizers are feeding them. Hopefully, that's long enough to get you started—"

"Yes! You can actually see with the localizers, you can actually input commands to them?"

"With enough practice." He showed the boy where to set localizer grains around the orbit of his eye, and how to cue the nearby localizers to cooperate. "Don't do that in public. The synthesized beam is very narrow, but might still be noticed."

Vinh stared as if sightless. "Ah, it's like something is nibbling at the back of my eyes."

"The localizers are tickling your optic nerve directly. What pops up may be very weird at first. You can learn the commands with some simple exercises, but learning to make sense of the visual tickle...well, I guess that's like learning to see again." Pham guessed it was a lot like a blind man learning to use a visual prosthesis. Some people could do it, some remained blind. He didn't say that out loud. Instead, he led Ezr through some test patterns, patterns that Vinh could practice with.

Pham had thought a lot about just how much of the command interface to show the Vinh boy. But Ezr already knew enough to betray him. Short of killing him, there was no cure for that.All the bloody clues I laid, pointingat the Zamle Eng story, and he still picked up on the truth. Pray it was onlyhis Great Family background that made that possible. Pham had kept him in ignorance for years now, watching for signs of counterscheming, trying to measure the boy's actual ability. What he had seen was a compulsive, unsure adolescent coming of age in a tyranny—and still retaining some sense.

When the crunch came, when Pham finally moved against Nau and Brughel, he would need someone to help pull all the strings. The boy should be taught some of the tricks...but there were nights Pham ground his teeth, thinking of the power he was handing to a Vinh.

Ezr learned the command set very quickly. Now he should have no trouble learning the other techniques that Pham had opened for him. Full vision would come slowly, but—

"Yes, I know you still can't see more than flashes of light. Just keep trying the test patterns. In a few Msecs, you'll be as good as I am."Almostas good.

Just the assurance seemed to calm the boy. "Okay, I'll practice and practice—all in my room, as you say. This makes me feel...I don't know, like I've accomplished more just now than I have in years."

One hundred seconds of the alloted time remained. The masking that disguised them to the snoops couldn't be aborted. Never mind. Just react to the kid naturally. Platitudes. "You did plenty in the past. Together, we've learned a lot about the Hammerfest operation."

"Yes, but this will be different....What will things be like after we win, sir?"

"Afterwards?" What not to say? "It will be...magnificent. We will have Qeng Ho technology and a planetary civilization very nearly capable of using it. By itself, that is the most powerful trading position any Qeng Ho has ever had. But we will have more. Given time, we'll have ramdrives that take advantage of what we've learned from OnOff's physics. And you know the DNA diversity on Arachna. That by itself is an enormous treasure, a box of surprises that could power—"

"And all the Focused will be set free."

"Yes, yes. Of course. Don't worry, Vinh, we'll get Trixia back." That was an expensive promise, but one Pham intended to keep. With Trixia Bonsol free, maybe Vinh would listen to reason about the rest. Maybe.

Pham realized that the boy was looking at him strangely; he had let the silence stretch into unwelcome implications. "Okay. I think we've covered the ground. Practice the input language and the visual test patterns. For now, our time is up."Thank the Lord of All Trade. "You take off first, back the way you came. The cover story is you got almost to the taxi port, then decided to go back to the dayroom for breakfast."

"Okay." Vinh hesitated an instant, as if wanting to say more. Then he turned and floated back around the curve of the inner balloon.

Pham watched the timer that hung at the back of his vision. In twenty seconds, he would depart in the other direction. The localizers had fed two thousand seconds of carefully planned lies back to Brughel's snoops. Later, Pham would check it over for consistency with what was really going on throughout the rest of the temp. There would be some patching necessary, no doubt. This kind of meeting would have been easy if the enemy had been ordinary analysts. With ziphead snoops, covering your ass was a major exercise in paranoia.

Ten seconds. He stared into the dimness at where Ezr Vinh had just disappeared. Pham Nuwen had a lifetime of experience in diplomacy and deception.So why the bloody hell wasn't I smoother with the kid? The ghost of Sura Vinh seemed suddenly very close, and she was laughing.

• • •

"You know, we really need to get localizers aboard Hammerfest." The request had become a ritual at the beginning of Ritser Brughel's security briefings. Today, maybe Ritser was in for a surprise.

"Anne's people haven't finished their evaluation."

The Vice-Podmaster leaned forward. Over the years, Ritser had changed more than most. Nowadays, he was on-Watch almost fifty percent, but he was also making heavy use of medical support and the Hammerfest gym. He actually looked healthier than he had during the early years. And somewhere along the way, he had learned to satisfy his...needs...without producing an unending stream of dead zipheads. He had grown to be a dependable Podmaster. "Have you seen Reynolt's latest report, sir?"

"Yes. She's saying five more years." Anne's search for security holes in the Peddler localizers was close to impossible. In the early years, Tomas had been more hopeful. After all, the Qeng Ho security hackers had had no ziphead support. But the quagmire of Qeng Ho software was almost eight thousand years deep. Every year, Anne's zipheads pushed back their deadline for certainty another year or two. And now this latest report.

"Five more years, sir. She might as well be saying ‘never.' We both know how unlikely it is that these localizers are a danger. My zipheads have been using them for twelve years on the temp and in the junked starships. My zips aren't programmer specialists, but I'll tell you, in all that time the localizers have come up as clean as anything Qeng Ho. These gadgets are so useful, sir. Nothing gets past them.Not using them has its own risks."

"Such as?"

Nau saw the other's faint start of surprise; this was more encouragement than Ritser had received in some time. "Um. Such as the things we miss because we aren't using them. Let's just look at the current briefing." There followed a not-too-relevant discourse on all the recent security concerns: Gonle Fong's attempts to acquire automation for her black-market farms; the perverse affection people of all factions had developed for the Spiders—a desirable sublimation, but a potential problem when the time for real action finally arrived; the proper level for Anne's paranoia. "I know you monitor her, sir, but I think she's drifting. It's not just this fixation about system trapdoors. She's become significantly more possessive of ‘her' zipheads."

"It's possible I've tuned her too edgy." Anne's suspicions about sabotaged zipheads were totally amorphous, quite unlike her usual analytical precision. "But what does that have to do with enabling localizers in Hammerfest?"

"With localizer support in Hammerfest, my snoops could do constant, fine-grain analysis—correlate the net traffic with exactly what is happening physically. It's...it's a scandal that our weakest security is in the place where we need the strongest."

"Hmm." He looked back into Ritser's eyes. As a child, Tomas Nau had learned an important rule: Whatever else, never lie to yourself. Throughout history, self-deception had ruined great men from Helmun Dire to Pham Nuwen. Be honest: He reallyreally wanted the lake that Qiwi had shown him under Hammerfest. With such a park, he would have made something of this squalor, a splendor that the Qeng Ho rarely exceeded even in civilized systems. All that was no excuse to break security—but maybe his self-denial was itself making things worse.Take a different tack: Whoappears to be pushing this? Ritser Brughel was awfully enthusiastic about it. He must not be underestimated. Less directly, Qiwi had created this dilemma: "What about Qiwi Lisolet, Ritser? What do your analysts say about her?"

Something glittered in Ritser's eyes. He still held a homicidal hatred for Qiwi. "We both know how fast she can twig the truth—close surveillance is more important than ever. But at the moment, she's absolutely, totally clean. She doesn't love you, but her admiration for you is nearly as strong as love. She is a masterpiece, sir."

Qiwi was twigging about every other Watch now. But her last scrubbing was very recent—and extending the localizer coverage would keep her under an even tighter watch. Nau thought it over for a moment more, then nodded. "Okay, Vice-Podmaster, let's bring the localizers to Hammerfest."

Of course, the Qeng Ho localizers were already aboard Hammerfest. The dustlike motes spread on air currents, stuck to clothes and hair and even skin. They were ubiquitous throughout all inhabited spaces around the rockpile.

Ubiquitous they might be, but without power the localizers were harmless pieces of metallic glass. Now Anne's people reprogrammed Hammerfest's cable spines—and extended them into the newly dug caves beneath. Now, ten times a second, microwaves pulsed in every open space. The energy was far below biological-damage thresholds, so low that it didn't interfere with the other utilities in place. The Qeng Ho localizers didn't need much power, just enough to run their tiny sensors and communicate with their nearest neighbors. Ten Ksec after the microwave pulses were turned on, Ritser reported that the net had stabilized and was providing good data. Millions of processors, scattered across a diameter of four hundred meters. Each was scarcely more powerful than a Dawn Age computer. In principle, they were the most powerful computer net at L1.

In four days, Qiwi finished digging out the cave, and emplaced the wave servos. Her father was already brewing soil on the uplands. The water would come last, but it would come.