Part 14 (1/2)

By now he knew that was the ”handmaiden” he had seen in the fen. Even knowing, it was still hard to believe. One weak woman, commanding a stars.h.i.+p and a crew of a thousand (though soon almost all of those were off-Watch, in coldsleep). Hmm. Maybe she had been the owner's concubine, but had poisoned him and now ruled in his place. That was a credible scenario, but it made her an exceptionally dangerous person. In fact, Sura had been a junior captain, the leader of the faction that voted against staying at Canberra. Those who stayed called them ”the cautious cowards.” And now they were heading home, into certain bankruptcy.

Pham remembered the look on her face when they finally caught him and brought him to the bridge. She had scowled down at the little prince, a boy still dressed in the velvet of Canberran n.o.bility.

”You've delayed the start of the Watches, young fellow.”

The language was barely intelligible to Pham. The boy pushed down the panic and the loneliness and glared right back at her. ”Madam. I am your hostage, not your slave, not your victim.”

”d.a.m.n, what did he say?” Sura Vinh looked around at her lieutenants. ”Look, son. It's a sixty-year flight. We've got to put you away.”

That last comment got through the language barrier, but it sounded too much like what the stable boss said when he was going to behead a horse. ” No! No!You'll not put me in a coffin.”

And Sura Vinh understood that, too.

One of the others spoke abruptly to s.h.i.+pmaster Vinh. Probably something like ”It doesn't matter what he wants, ma'am.”

Pham tensed himself for another futile wrestling match. But Sura just stared at him for a second and then ordered everyone else out of her office. The two of them talked pidgin for some Ksecs. Pham knew court intrigue and strategy, and none of it seemed to apply here. Before they were done, the little boy was crying inconsolably and Sura had her arm across his shoulders. ”It will be years,” she said. ”You understand that?”

”. . .Y-yes.”

”You'll arrive an old man if you don't let us put you in coldsleep.” That last was still an unfortunate word.

” No, no, no! No, no, no!I'll die first.” Pham Nuwen was beyond logic.

Sura was silent for a moment. Years later, she told Pham her her side of the encounter: ”Yeah, I could have heaved you in the freezer. It would have been prudent and ethical-and it would have saved me a world of problems. I will never understand why Deng's fleet committee forced me to accept you; they were petty and p.i.s.sed, but this was too much. side of the encounter: ”Yeah, I could have heaved you in the freezer. It would have been prudent and ethical-and it would have saved me a world of problems. I will never understand why Deng's fleet committee forced me to accept you; they were petty and p.i.s.sed, but this was too much.

”So there you were, a little kid sold out by his own father. I'd be d.a.m.ned if I'd treat you the way he and the committee did. Besides, if you spent the flight on ice, you'd still be a zero when we got to Namqem, helpless in a tech civilization. So why not let you stay out of coldsleep and try to teach you the basics? I figured you'd see how long the years looked in a s.h.i.+p between the stars. In a few years, the coldsleep coffins might not seem quite so terrible to you.”

It hadn't been simple. s.h.i.+p security had to be reprogrammed for the presence of an irresponsible human. No uncrewed Tween Watches could be allowed. But the programming was done, and several of the Watch standers volunteered to extend their time out of coldsleep.

The Reprise Reprise reached ramcruise, 0.3 lightspeed, and sailed endlessly across the depths. reached ramcruise, 0.3 lightspeed, and sailed endlessly across the depths.

And Pham Nuwen had all the time in the universe. Several crewfolk-Sura for the first few Watches-did their best to tutor him. At first, he would have none of it. . .but the time stretched long. He learned to speak Sura's language. He learned generalities about Qeng Ho.

”We trade between the stars,” said Sura. The two were sitting alone on the ramscoop's bridge. The windows showed a symbolic map of the five star systems that the Qeng Ho circuited.

”Qeng Ho is an empire,” the boy said, looking out at the stars and trying to imagine how those territories compared with his father's kingdom.

Sura laughed. ”No, not an empire. No government can maintain itself across light-years. h.e.l.l, most governments don't last more than a few centuries. Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.”

Little Pham Nuwen frowned. Even now, Sura's words were sometimes nonsense. ”No. It has to be an empire.”

Sura didn't argue. A few days later, she went off-Watch, dead in one of the strange, cold coffins. Pham almost begged her not to kill herself, and for Msecs afterward he grieved on wounds he hadn't imagined before. Now there were other strangers, and unending days of silence. Eventually he learned to read Nese.

And two years later, Sura returned from the dead. The boy still refused to go off-Watch, but from that point on he welcomed everything they wanted to teach him. He knew there was power beyond any Canberran lords.h.i.+p here, and now he understood that he might be master of it. In two years, he made up for what a child of civilization might learn in five. He had a competency in math; he could use the top- and second-level Qeng Ho program interfaces.

Sura looked almost the same as before her coldsleep, except that in some strange way, she seemed younger now. One day he caught her staring at him.

”So what's the problem?” Pham asked.

Sura grinned. ”I never saw a kid on a long flight. You're what now, fifteen Canberra years old? Bret tells me you've learned a lot.”

”Yes. I'm going to be Qeng Ho.”

”Hmm.” She smiled, but it was not the patronizing, sympathy-filled smile that Pham remembered. She was truly pleased, and she didn't disbelieve his claim. ”You've got an awful lot to learn.”

”I've got an awful lot of time to do it.”

Sura Vinh stayed on Watch four straight years that time. Bret Trinli stayed for the first of those years, extending his own Watch. The three of them trekked through every accessible cubic meter of the Reprise: Reprise: the sick-bay and coffins, the control deck, the fuel tanks. The the sick-bay and coffins, the control deck, the fuel tanks. The Reprise Reprise had burned almost two million tonnes of hydrogen to reach ramcruise speeds. In effect, she was a vast, nearly empty hulk now. ”And without lots of support at the destination, this s.h.i.+p will never fly again.” had burned almost two million tonnes of hydrogen to reach ramcruise speeds. In effect, she was a vast, nearly empty hulk now. ”And without lots of support at the destination, this s.h.i.+p will never fly again.”

”You could refuel, even if there were only gas giants at the destination. Even I could manage the programs for that.”

”Yeah, and that's what we did at Canberra. But without an overhaul, we can't go far and we can't do zip once we get there.” Sura paused, cursed under her breath. ”Those d.a.m.n fools. Why did they stay behind?” Sura seemed caught between her contempt for the s.h.i.+pmasters who had stayed to conquer Canberra, and her own guilt at having deserted them.

Bret Trinli broke the silence. ”Don't feel so bad for them. They're taking a big chance, but if they win, they'll have the Customers we were all expecting there.”

”I know-and we're guaranteed to arrive at Namqem with nothing. Bet we'll lose the Reprise. Reprise. ” She shook herself, visibly pus.h.i.+ng back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. ”Okay, in the meantime we're going to create one more trained crewmember.” She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. ”What specialty do we need the most, Bret?” ” She shook herself, visibly pus.h.i.+ng back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. ”Okay, in the meantime we're going to create one more trained crewmember.” She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. ”What specialty do we need the most, Bret?”

Trinli rolled his eyes. ”You mean that can bring us the most income? Obviously: Programmer-Archeologist.”

The question was, could a feral child like Pham Nuwen ever become one? By now, the boy could use almost all the standard interfaces. He even thought of himself as a programmer, and potentially a s.h.i.+p's master. With the standard interfaces, one could fly the Reprise, Reprise, execute planetary orbit insertion, monitor the coldsleep coffins- execute planetary orbit insertion, monitor the coldsleep coffins- ”And if anything goes wrong, you're dead, dead, dead” was how Sura finished Pham's litany of prowess. ”Boy, you have to learn something. It's something that children in civilization often are confused about, too. We've had computers and programs since the beginning of civilization, even before s.p.a.ceflight. But there's only so much they can do; they can't think their way out of an unexpected jam or do anything really creative.”

”But-I know that's not true. I play games with the machines. If I set the skill ratings high, I never win.”

”That's just computers doing simple things, very fast. There is only one important way that computers are anything like wise. They contain thousands of years of programs, and can run most of them. In a sense, they remember every slick trick that Humankind has ever devised.”

Bret Trinli sniffed. ”Along with all the nonsense.”

Sura shrugged. ”Of course. Look. What's our crew size-when we're in-system and everybody is up?”

”One thousand and twenty-three,” said Pham. He had long since learned every physical characteristic of the Reprise Reprise and this voyage. and this voyage.

”Okay. Now, suppose you're light-years from nowhere-”

Trinli: ”You don't have to suppose that, it's the pure truth.”

”-and something goes wrong. It takes perhaps ten thousand human specialties to build a stars.h.i.+p, and that's on top of an enormous capital industry base. There's no way a s.h.i.+p's crew can know everything it takes to a.n.a.lyze a star's spectrum, and make a vaccine against some wild change in the bactry, and understand every deficiency disease we may meet-”

”Yes!” said Pham. ”That's why we have the programs and the computers.”

”That's why we can't survive without them. Over thousands of years, the machine memories have been filled with programs that can help. But like Bret says, many of those programs are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs.” She paused, looked at Pham significantly. ”It takes a smart and highly trained human being to look at what is available, to choose and modify the right programs, and then to interpret the results properly.”

Pham was silent for a moment, thinking back to all the times the machines had not done what he really wanted. It wasn't always Pham's fault. The programs that tried to translate Canberran to Nese were c.r.a.p. ”So. . . you want me to learn to program something better.”

Sura grinned, and there was a barely suppressed chuckle from Bret. ”We'll be satisfied if you become a good programmer, and then learn to use the stuff that already exists.”

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines-flying machines, the peasants said-from the great days of Canberra's original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise Reprise 's local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it-the horror of it, Sura said-was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra's past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex-and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. 's local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it-the horror of it, Sura said-was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra's past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex-and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.