A Deepness in the Sky (65 page)

The field link could support only low-rate video, so Pham couldn't see what Sammy's team was up to. But they were moving still farther away. After a moment: "Pham! We've broken through the rubble into...a university campus. There's a blowout, and—" A still-pic from Sammy's group popped up in Pham's huds. There was a parklike lawn, at least several dozen locals running toward the camera—none of them wearing pressure suits. But up near the ceiling, dust and loose papers swirled. The audio feed was full of the high-pitched whistle of a substantial leak.

A second still-pic was mostly formed, this showing Sammy's men at work with industrial patching equipment. The large crowd was coming out of nowhere, some of them children—the place must be one of those inverse towers. Sammy's voice was back on the comm. "These are my people, Pham!"

Pham remembered that the Tarelsk side of Sammy Park's family had been academics.Damn. "Don't get sidetracked, Sammy. This place has more floorspace than all the cities on an average planet. The chances are zero we came down next to—"

"Not zero..." His voice broke in and out of audibility. "...didn't tell you, seemed like a small thing. I made sureFar Regard would end up near the Polytech."

Double damn.

"Look, we can save them, Pham! But more—they've been waiting for us....Some of Sura's people are here. Between them, they've got the core utility plans...and some of the new regime's software changes. Pham, they think they know where the screwballs are holed up!"

Maybe it was a good thing that Sammy had had his own agenda; as ground combateers, the Qeng Ho pretty much stank. But with the core utility plans, they had a good fix on the governance and its control net.

Ten Ksec later, Pham had a comm link with the madmen who called themselves governance: a half-dozen red-eyed, panicky people. Their leader wore a uniform that might once have been from park maintenance. They were an endpoint of civilization.

"There's nothing you can do but make things worse," Pham told them.

"Nonsense. We have Tarelsk. We've wiped you and the gluttons at Maresk. We have more than enough resources to make Tarelsk self-sufficient. With you gone, we will bring a new order." And then the video wavered and faded; Pham never knew if the break was deliberate or just the fractured comm system.

It didn't matter. The conversation had lasted long enough to identify the intermediate nodes. And Pham Nuwen's forces had hardware and software that was outside the heredity of Namqem. With their equipment and the help of the local population, the mad governance couldn't survive more than a few more Ksecs.

When it was gone, the hardest work of the Rescue began.

THIRTY-NINE

The Qeng Ho Grand Meeting was held 20Msec later. Namqem solar system was still a disaster area. Alqin was mostly empty, its people camped on Namqem world, but not starving. Maresk, the smallest moon, was a radioactive wreck; rebuilding it would be the work of centuries. Almost a billion people had died there. But the last food shipment had been saved, the outer system agri automation restarted, and there was enough food for the two billion survivors on Tarelsk. The automation of Namqem had been trashed, and was operating at perhaps ten percent of its pre-debacle efficiency. The people of Namqem system who had survived till now would live to rebuild. There would be no extinction, no dark age. The survivors' grandchildren would wonder at the terror of this time.

But there still was no civilized venue for the Grand Meeting. Pham and Sura stuck by the original decision. The Meeting would be out in Brisgo Gap, the most deserted place in the middle system. At least there was no destruction to look upon there, no local problems to solve. From Brisgo Gap, Namqem world and its three moons were just a blue-green disk and three spots of light.

Sura Vinh used the last of her asteroid resources to build the Grand Meeting temp. Pham had hoped that she would be impressed by the success that the Qeng Ho Plan had had. "We saved the civilization, Sura. Surely you believe me now. We can be more than furtive traders."

But Sura Vinh was so old now. At the dawn of civilization, medical science had promised immortality. In the early millennia, progress had been rapid. Two hundred years of life, even three hundred, were achieved. After that, each advance was less impressive and more costly. And so Humankind had gradually lost another of its naive dreams. Coldsleep might postpone death for thousands of years, but even with the best medical support, you couldn't expect much more than five hundred years of real lifetime. It was the ultimate limit on one man's reach. And getting near that limit took an awful toll.

Sura's powered chair was more like a mobile hospital ward than a piece of furniture. Her arms twitched up, weak even in zero gee. "No, Pham," she said. Her eyes were clear and green as ever, surely transplants or artificial. Her voice was more obviously synthetic, but Pham could hear the familiar smile in it. "The Grand Meeting must decide, remember? We've never agreed on your plans. The point of coming together was to put the issue to a vote."

That was what Sura had said ever since the earliest centuries, when she'd realized that Pham would never give up his dream.Oh, Sura, I don'twant to hurt you, but if my view must explicitly win over yours, so be it.

The temp that Sura towed into the middle of Brisgo Gap was enormous, even by the standards of her pre-debacle holdings. The starships of all the surviving fleets could moor at it, and Sura provided security extending out more than two million kilometers beyond the Gap.

The temp's central volume was a zero-gee meeting hall. It was probably the grandest in history, large beyond all practical use. For Msecs before the Meeting itself, there was socializing, the largest single meeting of Traders there had ever been, probably the largest that would ever be. Pham took every Ksec he could from the rescue schedules to participate. Every day, he was making more contacts, interacting more than he could in a century of his life until now. Somehow he had to convert the doubters. And there were so many of them. They were basically decent, but so cautious and clever. Many of them were his own descendants. Their admiration—even their affection—seemed sincere, but he was never sure how many he had really convinced. Pham realized that he was edgier than he had ever been in combat, or even in hard trading.Never mind, he told himself. He had waited all his life for this. Small wonder that he should be nervous when the final test was just Msecs away.

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 littlechuff, 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."