A Deepness in the Sky

And then what is left? For a long time, Pham's mind dwelled in a nothingness. And then once more, he became aware of the images flickering around him from the localizer net: down on the rockpile, the Focused slaves crammed by the hundreds in the honeycombs of Hammerfest, Anne Reynolt asleep in a cell as small as any.

They deserved better than what had happened to them. They deserved better than what Tomas Nau had planned for them. Anne deserved better.

He reached out into the net, and gently touched Ezr Vinh, motioned him aside. He gathered the boy's efforts up and began building them out into an effective patch. There were details: the bruises on Vinh's neck, the need for ten thousand new localizers in the temp interspace. He could handle them, and in the longer run—

Anne Reynolt would eventually recover from what he had done to her. When that happened, the game of cat-and-mouse would resume, but this time he must protect her and all the other slaves. It would be so much harder than before. But maybe with Ezr Vinh, if they worked as a real team...The plans formed and re-formed in Pham's mind. It was a far cry from breaking the wheel of history, but there was a strange, rising pleasure in doing what felt wholly right.

And somewhere before he finally fell asleep, he remembered Gunnar Larson, the old man's gentle mocking, the old man's advice that Pham understand the limits of the natural world, and accept them.So maybe he wasright. Funny. All the years in this room he had lain awake, grinding his teeth, planning his plans and dreaming what he might do with Focus. Now that he had given it up, there were still plans, still terrible dangers...but for the first time in many years there was also...peace.

That night he dreamed of Sura. And there was no pain.

PART THREE

FORTY-FOUR

There is always an angle. Gonle Fong had lived her whole life by that principle. The mission to the OnOff star had been a long shot, the sort of thing that appealed mainly to scientists. But Gonle had seen angles. Then had come the Emergent ambush, and the long shot had been turned into servitude and exile. A prison run by thugs. But even then there was an angle. For almost twenty years of her life she had played the angles and prospered—if only by the standards of this dump.

Now things were changing. Jau Xin had been gone for more than four days, at least since the beginning of her current Watch. At first the rumor was that he and Rita had been unofficially moved to Watch tree C, and that they were still in coldsleep. That screwed some of the programming deals she had planned with Rita—and it was also as unusual as hell. Then Trinli reported that two pilot zipheads were missing from the Hammerfest Attic. So. Rita might still be on ice, but Jau Xin and his zipheads were...elsewhere. The rumors grew from there: Jau was on an expedition to the dead sun, Jau was landing on the Spider world. Trud Silipan strutted around Benny's, smug with some inner secret that for once he was not sharing. More than anything, that proved that something very strange was going on.

Gonle had run a betting pool on the speculations, but she was suffering from sucker fever herself. She wasn't one bit disappointed when the big bosses decided to let them all in on the secret.

Tomas Nau invited a handful of the peons down to his estate for the briefing. This was first time Gonle had been to Lake Park since the open house. Nau had made a big thing of his hospitality then. Afterward, the place had been locked tight—though to be honest, part of that might be because of what happened to Anne Reynolt during the open house.

As Gonle and the three other chosen peons shuffled down the footpath toward Nau's lodge, she passed her critical judgment on the scene. "So they figured out how to do rain." It was more a windblown mist, so fine it dewed her hair and eyelashes, so fine that the lack of real gravity didn't matter.

Pham Trinli gave a cynical chuckle. "I'll bet it's partly garbage collection. In my time, I've seen plenty of these faked gravity parks, usually built by some Customer with more money than sense. If you want to have a groundside and a skyside, the clutter starts piling up. Pretty soon you have a sky full of crap."

Walking beside him, Trud Silipan said, "Sky looks pretty clean to me."

Trinli looked up into the driven mist. The clouds were low and gray, moving quickly in from the lake's far shore. Some of this was real and some must be wallpaper, but the two were seamlessly meshed. Not a cheerful scene by Gonle Fong's standards, but one that was chill and clean. "Yeah," he said after a moment. "I gotta hand it to you, Trud. Your Ali Lin is a genius."

Silipan puffed up a little. "Not just him. It's the coordination that counts. I've got a team of zipheads on this. Every year it just gets better. Someday we'll even figure out how to make natural-looking sea waves."