by Vernor Vinge
“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 Family owns 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’s talking 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 Trixia said.
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 wou
ld 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. A Strentmannian 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.”
Ezr finished a sequence and took another sample. “Well,” he said, “Trixia thinks they don’t see this as a trade interaction at all.”
“Um.” Funny how Qiwi insulted almost everything about Vinh—except Trixia. Mostly she just seemed to ignore Trixia. Qiwi was uncharacteristically silent. For almost a second. “I think your friend has it right. Look, Vinh, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but there’s quite a split on the Trading Committee.” Unless her own mother had blabbed, this had to be fantasy. “My guess is, there are some idiots on the Committee who think this is purely a business negotiation, each side bringing their best to a common effort—and as usual, our side being the cleverest negotiator. They don’t understand that if we get murdered, it doesn’t matter that the other side has a net loss. We’ve got to play this tough, be ready for an ambush.”
In her own bloodthirsty way, Qiwi sounded like Trixia. “Mama hasn’t said so straight out, but they may be deadlocked.” She looked at him sideways, a child pretending to conspiracy. “You’re an owner, Ezr. You could talk to—”
“Qiwi!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything!”
She let him be for a hundred seconds or so, then started on her schemes for making profit off the Emergents, “if we live through the next few Msecs.” If the Spider world and the OnOff star hadn’t existed, the Emergents would have been the find of the century in this end of Qeng Ho space. From watching their fleet operations, it was clear that they had some special cleverness with automation and systems planning. At the same time, their starships were less than half as fast as the Qeng Ho’s, and their bioscience was just bad. Qiwi had a hundred plans for turning all that to profit.
Ezr let the words wash over him, barely heard. Another time, he might have lost himself in concentration on the work at hand. No chance on this shift. Plans that spanned two centuries were all coming down to a few critical Ksecs now, and for the first time he wondered about his fleet’s management. Trixia was an outsider, but brilliant and with a different viewpoint from lifelong Traders. The Brat was smart, but normally her opinions were worthless. This time…maybe “Mama” had put her up to this. Kira Pen Lisolet’s outlook had been formed very far away, about as far as you could get and still be in the Qeng Ho realm; maybe she thought a teenage apprentice could affect things just because he was from an owner’s Family. Damn…
The shift passed without further insight. He’d be off in fifteen hundred seconds. If he skipped lunch, he had time to change clothes…time to ask for an appointment with Captain Park. In the two years subjective that he’d been with the expedition, he had never presumed on his Family connections. And what good can I really do now? Could I really break a stalemate? He dithered around that worry through the end of the shift. He was still dithering as he chucked his bactry coveralls…and…called the Captain’s Audience Secretary.
Qiwi’s grin was as insolent as ever. “Tell ’em straight, Vinh. This has to be an armsman operation.”
He waved her silent, then noticed that his call hadn’t gone through. Blocked? For an instant, Ezr felt a pang of relief, then saw he was preempted by an incoming order…from Captain Park’s office. “To appear at 5.20.00 at the Fleet Captain’s planning room…” What was the ancient curse about getting one’s wish? Ezr Vinh’s thoughts were distinctly muddled as he climbed to the temp’s taxi locks.
Qiwi Lin Lisolet was no longer in evidence; what a wise little girl.
The meeting was not with some staff officer. Ezr showed up at the Fleet Captain’s planning room on the QHS Pham Nuwen, and there was the Fleet Captain…and the expedition’s Trading Committee. They did not look happy. Vinh got only a quick glimpse before coming to attention at the bracing pole. Out of the corner of his eyes he did a quick count. Yes, every one of them was here. They hung around the room’s conference table, and their gaze did not seem friendly.
Park acknowledged Ezr’s brace with a brusque wave of his hand. “At ease, Apprentice.” Three hundred years ago, when Ezr had been five, Captain Park had visited the Vinh Family temp in Canberra space. His parents had treated the fellow royally, even though he wasn’t a senior ship’s master. But Ezr remembered more the parkland gifts from what seemed a genuinely friendly fellow.
At their next encounter, Vinh was a seventeen-year-old would-be apprentice and Park was outfitting a fleet to Triland. What a difference. They had spoken perhaps a hundred words since, and then only at formal expedition occasions. Ezr had been just as glad for the anonymity; what he wouldn’t give for a return to it now.
Captain Park looked as though he had swallowed something sour. He glanced around at the members of the Trading Committee, and Vinh suddenly wondered just whom he was angry at. “Young V—Apprentice Vinh. We have an…unusual…situation here. You know the delicacy of our situation now that the Emergents have arrived.” The Captain didn’t seem to be looking for an acknowledgment, and Ezr’s “yessir” died before it reached his lips. “At this point we have several courses of action possible.” Again a glance at the Committee members.
And Ezr realized that Qiwi Lisolet hadn’t been spouting complete nonsense. A Fleet Captain had absolute authority in tactical situations, and normally a veto vote on strategic issues. But for major changes in expedition goals, he was at the mercy of his Trading Committee. And something had gone wrong with the process. Not an ordinary tie; Fleet Captains had a deciding vote in cases such as that. No, this must be a deadlock verging on a mutiny of the management class. It was a situation the teachers always mumbled about in school, but if it ever happened, then just maybe a junior owner would become a factor in the decision process. Sort of a sacrificial goat.
“First possibility,” continued Park, oblivious of the unhappy conclusions rattling around in Vinh’s head. “We play the game the Emergents propose. Joint operations. Joint control of all vehicles in this upcoming groundside mission.”
Ezr took in the appearance of the Committee members. Kira Pen Lisolet sat next to the Fleet Captain. She was dressed in the Lisolet-green uniform her Family affected. The woman was almost as small as Qiwi, her features sober and attentive. But there w
as an impression of raw physical strength. The Strentmannian body type was extreme even by Qeng Ho standards of diversity. Some Traders prided themselves on their masked demeanor. Not Kira Pen Lisolet. Kira Lisolet loathed Park’s first “possibility” as much as Qiwi claimed.
Ezr’s attention slid to another familiar face. Sum Dotran. Management committees were an elite. There were a few active owners, but the majority were professional planners, working their way up to a stake that would allow them to own their ships. And there was a minority of very old men. Most of the old guys were consummate experts, truly preferring management over any form of ownership. Sum Dotran was such. At one time he had worked for the Vinh Family. Ezr guessed that he opposed Park’s first “possibility,” too.
“Second possibility: Separate control structures, no jointly crewed landers. As soon as practicable, we reveal ourselves directly to the Spiders”—and let the Lord of Trade sort the greater winners from the lesser. Once there were three players, the advantage to simple treachery should be diminished. In a few years their relationship with the Emergents could become a relatively normal, competitive one. Of course, the Emergents might regard unilateral contact as a kind of betrayal in itself. Too bad. It seemed to Vinh that at least half the Committee supported this path—but not Sum Dotran. The old man jerked his head slightly at Vinh, making the message obvious.
“Third possibility: We pack up our temps and head back to Triland.”
Vinh’s stunned look must have been obvious. Sum Dotran elaborated. “Young Vinh, what the Captain means is that we are outnumbered and possibly outgunned. None of us trust these Emergents, and if they turn on us, there would be no recourse. It’s just too risky to—”
Kira Pen Lisolet slapped the table. “I object! This meeting was absurd to begin with. And worse, now we see Sum Dotran is simply using it to force his own views.” So much for the theory that Qiwi had been operating at her mother’s direction.
