A Deepness in the Sky

He tapped "execute." The SC cables behind the cabinet creaked and spread apart from each other, delivering enormous and precise currents to the MRI magnets. A second passed. His inner vision sputtered into blindness. Reynolt spasmed in his arms. He held her close, keeping her head away from the sides of the cabinet.

Her twitching subsided after a few seconds; her breath came relaxed and slow. Pham eased himself away from her.Move her out from the magnets. Okay. He touched her hair, brushing it away from her face. Nothing like that red hair had existed on Canberra...but Anne Reynolt reminded him of someone from a certain Canberra morning.

He fled blindly from the room, down the tunnel, back to the party by the lake.

FORTY-THREE

The open house at North Paw was the high point of the Watch, of any Watch to date. There wouldn't be anything so spectacular until the end of the Exile. Even the Qeng Ho who had made the park possible were amazed that so much could be done with such limited resources. Maybe there was something to Tomas Nau's claims about Focused systems and Qeng Ho initiative.

The party wound on for Ksecs after Jau Xin's frolic. At least three people ended up in the water. For a while there were meter-wide droplets wobbling above the lake. The Podmaster asked his guests to come back to the lodge and let the water settle itself. The favors of hundreds of people over a year had been expended on the party supplies, and the usual fools—including, most spectacularly, Pham Trinli—got very drunk.

Finally, the guests straggled out and the doors in the hillside were closed behind them. Privately, Ezr was sure this would be the last time the riffraff were invited into the Podmaster's domain. The riffraff had made the party possible, and Qiwi had obviously enjoyed every second of it, but Tomas Nau was beginning to fray toward the end of the party. The bastard was a clever one. For the price of one tedious afternoon, the Podmaster had gotten more goodwill than ever. A few decades of tyranny couldn't make Qeng Ho forget their heritage...but Nau had made their situation an ambiguous kind of not-tyranny.Focus is slavery. But Tomas Nau promised to free the zipheads at the end of the Exile. Ezr shouldn't hate the Qeng Ho for accepting the situation. Many otherwise free societies accepted parttime slavery.In any case, Nau's promise is a lie.

Anne Reynolt's unconscious body was found 4Ksecs after the end of the party. All the next day, there were rumors and panics: Reynolt was really brain-dead, some said, and the announcements were simply soft lies. Ritser Brughel hadn't been in coldsleep, others claimed, and now he had staged a coup. Ezr had his own theory.After all the years, Pham Nuwenhas finally acted.

Twenty Ksec into the workday, the ziphead support for two of the research teams fell into deadlock, a temperamental snit that Reynolt could have cleared in a few seconds. Phuong and Silipan whacked at the problem for 6Ksecs, then announced that the zipheads involved would be down for the rest of the day. No, they weren't translators—but Trixia had been working with one of them, some kind of geologist. Ezr tried to go over to Hammerfest.

"You're not on my list, buddy." There was actually a guard at the taxi port, one of Omo's goons. "Hammerfest is off-limits."

"For how long?"

"Dunno. Read the announcements, will you."

And so Ezr ended up in Benny's parlor, along with a mob and a half of other people. Ezr wedged down at the table with Jau and Rita. Pham was there, too, looking decidedly hungover.

Jau Xin had his own tale of woe: "Reynolt was supposed to retune my pilots. Not a big deal, but our drills went like crap without it."

"What are you complaining about? Your gear is still functioning, right? But we were trying to do an analysis of this Spider spaceflight stuff—and now our ziphead allocation is offline. Hey, I know bits of chemistry and engineering, but there's no way I can put it all to—"

Pham groaned loudly. He was holding his head with both hands. "Quit your bitching. This all makes me wonder about Emergent ‘superiority.' One person gets knocked out and your house of cards comes apart. Where's the superiority in that?"

Normally Rita Liao was a gentle sort, but the look she gave Pham was venomous. "You Qeng Ho murdered our superiority, remember? When we came here we had ten times the clinical staff we have now, enough to make our systems as good as anything back home."

There was an embarrassed silence. Pham glared back at Rita, but didn't argue further. After a moment he gave the abrupt shrug that everyone recognized: Trinli was bested, but unwilling to retreat or apologize.

A voice from the next table broke the silence. "Hey, Trud!"

Silipan was standing halfway through the parlor doorway, looking up at them. He was still wearing the Emergent dress uniform of the day before, but now the silken rags had new stains, and they were not artistic tints.