"I'm doing the maintenance." Well, that was at least cousin to the truth. Now counterattack: "And what are you doing here?"

Brughel's face got even darker. He pulled himself upward, his head ten centimeters above Qiwi's. Now his feet floated on air, too. "Scum have no business questioning me." He was carrying that silly steel baton. It was a plain metal dowel incised here and there with dark-stained dings. He braced himself with one hand and swung the baton through a glittering arc that splintered the sapling beside Qiwi's head.

Now Qiwi was getting angry, too. She grabbed one of the lower branches, hoisted herself so that she and Brughel were eye-to-eye once more. "That's vandalism, not an explanation." She knew that Tomas had the park monitored-and vandalism was at least the crime for Emergents that it was for Qeng Ho.

The Podmaster was so angry that he had trouble talking. "You're the vandals. This park was beautiful, more than I thought scum could ever make. But now you're sabotaging it. I was in here yesterday-you've infected it with vermin." He swung the metal dowel again, the blow dislodging a garbage web that was hidden in the branches. The web creatures floated off in all directions, silken glides streaming behind them. Brughel poked at the web, shaking beetle casings and dead leaves and miscellaneous detritus into a cloud around them. "See? What else are you poisoning?" He leaned close, looking down at her from above.

For a moment Qiwi just stared, uncomprehending. He couldn't possibly mean what he was saying. How could anyone be so ignorant? But remember, he's a Chump. She pulled herself high enough to look down at Brughel, and shouted into his face. "It's a zero-gee park, for God's sake! What do you think keeps the air clean of floating crap? The garbage bugs have always been here...though maybe they're a little overworked just now." She hadn't meant it quite the way it came out, but now she looked the Podmaster up and down as though she had one particularly large piece of garbage in mind.

They were above the lower leaf canopies now. From the corner of her eye, Qiwi could see Papa. The sky was limitless blue, guarded by an occasional branch. She could feel the fake sunlight hot on the back of her head. If they played a few more rounds of one-up-one-up, they'd be banging their heads on plastic. Qiwi started laughing.

And now Brughel was silent, just staring at her. He slapped his steel baton into his palm again and again. There were rumors about those dark stains in the metal; it was obvious what Ritser Brughel wanted people to think they were. But the guy just didn't carry himself like a fighter. And when he swung that baton, it was as though he had never considered the possibility that there might be targets that could fight back. Just now, his only hold-on was the toe of one boot hooked between branches. Qiwi braced herself unobtrusively and smiled her most insolent smile.

Brughel was motionless for a second. His gaze flicked to either side of her. And then without another word he pushed off, floundered for a moment, found a branch, and dived for the bottom-level hatch.

Qiwi floated silent, the strangest feelings chasing up her body, down her arms. For a moment she couldn't identify them. But the park...how wonderful it was with Ritser Brughel gone! She could hear the little buzzing sounds and the butterflies, where a moment before all her attention had tunneled down on the Podmaster's anger. And now she recognized the tingling in her arms, and the racing of her heart: rage and fear.

Qiwi Lin Lisolet had teased and enraged her share of people. It had been almost her hobby in pre-Flight. Mama said it was mind-hidden anger at the thought of being alone between the stars. Maybe. But it had also been fun. This was different.

She turned back toward her father's nest in the trees. And plenty of people had been angry with her over the years. Back in innocent times, Ezr Vinh used to get near apoplectic. Poor Ezr, I wish...But this today had been different. She had seen the difference in Ritser Brughel's eyes. The man had really wanted to kill her, had teetered on the edge of trying. And probably the only thing that stopped him was the thought that Tomas would know. But if Brughel could ever get her alone, unseen by the security monitors...

Qiwi's hands were shaking by the time she reached Ali Lin. Papa. She wanted so much to be held, to have him soothe the shaking. Ali Lin wasn't even looking at her. Papa had been Focused for several years now, but Qiwi could remember the times before so well. Before...Papa would have rushed out of the trees at the first sound of argument below. He would have put himself between Qiwi and Brughel, steel club or no. Now...Qiwi didn't remember much of the last few moments except for Ritser Brughel. But there were fragments: Ali had sat unmoved among his displays and analytics. He had heard the argument, even glanced their way when the shouting became loud and close. His look had been impatient, a "don't-distract-me" dismissal.

Qiwi reached out a still-shaking hand to touch his shoulder. He shrugged the way you might shoo off a pesky bug. In some ways Papa still lived, but in others he seemed more dead than Mama. Tomas said that Focus could be reversed. But Tomas needed Papa and the other Focused the way they were now. Besides, Tomas had been raised an Emergent. They used Focus to make people into property. They were proud of doing so. Qiwi knew that there were plenty of Qeng Ho survivors who considered all the talk of "reversal of Focus" to be a lie. So far, not a single Focused person had been reversed. Tomas wouldn't lie about something so important.

And maybe if she and Papa did well enough, she could get him back the sooner. For this wasn't a death that went on forever. She slipped into her seat beside him and resumed looking at the new diffs. The processors had given her the beginning of results while she was off trading insults with Ritser Brughel.

Papa would be pleased.

Nau still met with the Fleet Management Committee every Msec or so. Of course, just who attended changed substantially from Watch to Watch. Ezr Vinh was present today; it would be very interesting to see the boy's reaction to the surprise he had planned. And Ritser Brughel was attending, so he had asked Qiwi to stay away. Nau smiled to himself. Damn, I never guessed how thoroughly she could humiliate the man.

Nau had combined the committee with his own Emergent staff meetings and called them "Watch-manager" meetings. The point was always that whatever their old differences, they were all in this together now and survival could only come through cooperation. The meetings were not as meaningful as Nau's private consults with Anne Reynolt or his work with Ritser and the security people. Those often occurred between the regular Watches. Still, it wasn't a lie to say that important work was done at these per-Msec meetings. Nau flicked his hand at the agenda. "So. Our last item: Anne Reynolt's expedition to the sun. Anne?"

Anne didn't smile as she corrected him. "The astrophysicists' report, Podmaster. But first, I have a complaint. We need at least one unFocused specialist in this area. You know how hard it is to judge technical results..."

Nau sighed. She had been after him about this in private, too. "Anne, we don't have the resources. We have just three surviving specialists in this area." And they were all zipheads.

"I still need a reviewer with common sense." She shrugged. "Very well. Per your direction, we have run two of the astrophysicists on a continuous Watch since before the Relight. Keep in mind, they've had five years to think about this report." Reynolt waved at the air, and they were looking out on a modified Qeng Ho taxi. Auxiliary fuel tanks were strapped on every side, and the front was a forest of sensor gear. A silver shield-sail was propped on a rickety framework from one side of the craft. "Right before the Relight, Doctors Li and Wen flew this vehicle into low orbit around OnOff." A second window showed the descent path, and a final orbit scarcely five hundred kilometers above the surface of the OnOff star. "By keeping the sail properly oriented, they safely flew at that altitude for more than a day."

Actually it was Jau Xin's pilot-zipheads who had done the flying. Nau nodded at Xin. "That was good work, Pilot Manager."

Xin grinned. "Thank you, sir. Something to tell my children about."

Reynolt ignored the comment. She popped up multiple windows, showing low-altitude views in various spectral regimes. "We've had a hard time with the analysis right from the beginning."

They could hear the recorded voices of the two zipheads now. Li was Emergent-bred, but the other voice spoke in a Qeng Ho dialect. That must be Wen: "We've always known OnOff has the mass and density of a normal G star. Now we can make high-resolution maps of the interior temperatures and dens-" Dr. Li butted in with the typical urgency of a ziphead, "-but we need more microsats... Resources be damned. We need two hundred at least, right through the time of Relighting."

Reynolt paused the audio. "We got them one hundred microsats." More windows popped up, Li and Wen back at Hammerfest after the Relight, arguing and arguing. Reynolt's reports were often like this, a barrage of pictures and tables and sound bites.

Wen was talking again. He sounded tired. "Even in Off-state, the central densities were typical of a G star, yet there was no collapse. The surface turbulence is barely ten thousand kilometers deep. How? How? How?"

Li: "And after Relight, the deep internal structure looks still the same."

"We can't know for sure; we can't get close."

"No, it looks perfectly typical now. We have models..."

Wen's voice changed again. He was speaking faster, in a tone of frustration, almost pain. "All this data, and we have just the same mysteries as before. I've spent five years now studying reaction paths, and I'm as clueless as the Dawn Age astronomers. There has to be something going on in the extended core, or else there would be a collapse."

The other ziphead sounded petulant. "Obviously, even in Off state the star is still radiating, but radiating something that converts to low-interaction."

"But what? What? And if there could be such a thing, why don't the higher layers collapse?"

"Cuz the conversion is at the base of the photosphere, and that is collapsed! Ryop. I'm using your own modeling software to show this!"

"No. Post hoc nonsense, no better than ages past."

"But I've got data!"

"So? Your adiabats are-"

Reynolt cut the audio. "They went on like this for many days. Most of it is a private jargon, the sort of things a close-bound Focused pair often invents."

Nau straightened in his chair. "If they can only talk to each other, we have no access. Did you lose them?"

"No. At least not in the usual way. Dr. Wen became so frustrated that he began to consider random externalities. In a normal person that might lead to creativity but-"

Brughel laughed, genuinely amused. "So your astronomer laddie lost sight of the ball, eh, Reynolt?"

Reynolt didn't even look at Brughel. "Be silent," she said. Nau noticed the Peddlers' startlement at her words. Ritser was second-in-command, the obvious sadist among the rulers-and here she had abruptly put him down. I wonder when the Peddlers will figure it out. A scowl passed briefly across Brughel's features. Then his grin broadened. He settled back in his chair and flicked an amused glance in Nau's direction. Anne continued without missing a beat: "Wen backed off from the problem, setting it in a wider and wider context. At first, there was some relevance."

Wen's voice resumed, the same rushed monotone as before. "OnOff's galactic orbit. A clue." The presumptive graph of OnOff's galactic orbit-assuming no close stellar encounters-flashed in a window. Anne was dredging from the fellow's notebooks. The plot extended back over half a billion years. It was the typical flower-petal figure of a halo-population star: Once every two hundred million years, OnOff penetrated the hidden heart of the galaxy. From there, it swung out and out till the stars spread thin and the intergalactic dark began. Tomas Nau was no astronomer, but he knew that halo-pop stars don't have usable planetary systems, and as a result aren't often visited. But surely that was the least of the strangeness of OnOff.

Somehow the Qeng Ho ziphead had become totally fixated on the star's galactic orbit. "This thing-it can't be a star-has seen the Heart of All. Again and again and again-" Reynolt skipped through what must have been a long, trapped loop in poor Wen's thinking. The ziphead's voice was momentarily calmer: "Clues. There are lots of clues, really. Forget the physics; just consider the light curve. For two hundred and fifteen years out of two hundred and fifty, it radiates less perceptible energy than a brown dwarf." The windows accompanying Wen's thoughts flickered from idea to idea, pictures of brown dwarfs, the much more rapid oscillations that the physicists had extrapolated for OnOff's distant past. "Things are happening that we can't see. Relight, a light curve vaguely like a periodic Q-nova, settling over a few Msecs to a spectrum that might almost be an explainable star riding a fusion core. And then the light slowly fades back to zero...or changes into something else we cannot see. It's not a star at all! It's magic. A magic machine that now is broken. I'll bet it was a fast square-wave generator once. That's it! Magic from the heart of the galaxy, broken now so that we can't understand it."

The audio abruptly ended, and Wen's kaleidoscope of windows was fixed in mid-frenzy. "Dr. Wen has been thoroughly trapped in this cycle of ideas for ten Msec," said Reynolt.

Nau already knew where this was going, but he put on a concerned look anyway. "What are we left with?"

"Dr. Li is doing okay. He was slipping into his own contrarian cycle till we separated him from Wen. But now-well, he's fixated on the Qeng Ho system identification software. He has an enormously complex model that matches all the observations." More pictures, Li's theory of a new family of subatomic particles. "Dr. Li is spreading into the cognitive territory that Hunte Wen monopolized, but he's getting very different results."

Li's voice: "Yes. Yes! My model predicts stars like this must be common very near the galaxy's hole. Very very rarely, they interact, a strongly coupled explosion. The result gets kicked high out of the core." Of course, Li's trajectory was identical to Wen's after the presumed explosion. "I can fit all the parameters. We can't see blinking stars in the dust of the core; they're not bright and they're very high-rate. But once in a billion years we get this asymmetrical destruction, and an ejection." Pictures of the hypothetical explosion of OnOff's hypothetical destroyer. Pictures of OnOff's original solar system blown away-all except a tiny protected shadow on the far side of OnOff from the destroyer.

Ezr Vinh leaned forward. "Lord, he's explained just about everything."

"Yes," said Nau. "Even the singleton nature of the planetary system." He turned away from the jumble of windows, and looked at Anne. "So what do you think?"

Reynolt shrugged. "Who knows? That's why we need an unFocused specialist, Podmaster. Dr. Li is spreading his net wider and wider. That can be a symptom of a classic, explain-everything trap. And his particle theory is large; it may be a Shannon tautology." She paused. Anne Reynolt was totally incapable of showmanship. Nau had arranged his questions so her bombshell came out last: "That particle theory is in his central specialty, however. And it has consequences, perhaps a faster ramscoop drive."

No one said anything for several seconds. The Qeng Ho had been diddling their drives for thousands of years, since before Pham Nuwen even. They had stolen insights from hundreds of civilizations. In the last thousand years, they'd made less than a one-percent improvement. "Well, well, well." Tomas Nau knew how good it felt to gamble big...and win. Even the Peddlers were grinning like idiots. He let the good feeling pass back and forth around the room. It was very very good news, even if the payoff was at the end of the Exile. "This does make our astrophysicists a precious commodity. Can you do anything about Wen?"

"Hunte Wen is not recoverable, I'm afraid." She opened a window on medical imagery. To a Qeng Ho physician it might have looked like a simple brain diagnostic. To Anne Reynolt, it was a strategy map. "See, the connectivity here and here is associated with his work on OnOff; I've demonstrated that by detuning some of it. If we try to back him out of his fixation, we'll wipe his work of the last five years-as well as cross connections into much of his general expertise. Remember. Focus surgery is mainly grope and peek, with resolution not much better than a millimeter."

"So we'd end up with a vegetable?"

"No. If we back out and undo the Focus, he'll have the personality and most of the memories of before. He just won't be much of a physicist anymore."

"Hmm," said Nau, considering. So they couldn't just deFocus the Peddler and have the outside expert Reynolt needed. And I'll be damned if I'll risk deFocusing the third fellow. Yet there was a very tidy solution, that still made good use of all three men. "Okay, Anne. Here is what I propose. Bring the other physicist online, but on a low duty cycle. Keep Dr. Li in the freezer while the new fellow reviews Li's results. This won't be as good as an unFocused review, but if you do it cleverly the results should be pretty unbiased."

Another shrug. Reynolt had no false modesty, but she also didn't realize how very good she was.

"As for Hunte Wen," Nau continued. "He's done his best for us, and we can't ask for more." Literally so, according to Anne. "I want you to deFocus him."

Ezr Vinh was staring, openmouthed. The other Peddlers looked almost as shocked. There was a small risk here; Hunte Wen would not be the best proof that Focus could be reversed. On the other hand, he was obviously a hardship case. Show your concern: "We've run Dr. Wen for more than five years straight, and I see he is already middle-aged. Use whatever medical consumables it takes to give him the best health possible."

It was the final agenda item, and the meeting didn't continue for long after that. Nau watched as everyone floated out, jabbering to one another their enthusiasm about Li's discovery and Wen's manumission. Ezr Vinh left last, but he wasn't talking to anyone. The boy had a glassy look about him. Yes, Mr. Vinh. Be good, and maybe someday I'll free the one you care about.

SIXTEEN.

Things got very quiet during the Tween Watch. Most Watches were multiples of an Msec, with overlap so people could brief the new Watch on current problems. The Tween was no secret, but Nau officially treated it as a glitch in the scheduling program, a four-day gap that appeared between Watches every so often. In fact, it was like the missing seventh floor, or that mythical magic day that comes between Oneday and Twoday.

"Say, wouldn't it be great to have Tween Watches back home?" Brughel joked as he led Nau and Kal Omo into the corpsicle stacks. "I did security at Frenk for five years-it sure would have been easier if I could have declared time out every so often, and rearranged the game to suit my needs." His voice sounded loud in the hold, the echoes coming back from several directions. In fact, they were the only ones awake aboard the Suivire. Down on Hammerfest, there was Reynolt and a contingent of waking zipheads. A skeleton crew of Emergents and Peddlers-including Qiwi Lisolet-were working the stabilization jets on the rockpile. But, zipheads aside, only nine people knew the hardest secrets. And here between Watches, they could do all that was necessary to protect the pod.

The interior walls of the Suivire's coldsleep hold had been knocked out, and dozens of additional coffins installed. All of Watch A slept here, almost seven hundred people. Watch trees B and Misc were on the Brisgo Gap, while C and D were aboard the Common Good. But it was A's Watch that began after this Tween time.

A red light appeared on the wall; the hold's stand-alone data system was ready to talk. Nau put on his huds, and suddenly the caskets were labeled by name and affiliation. Everything looked green. Thank goodness. Nau turned to his podsergeant. Kal Omo's name, status, and vital signs floated in the air beside his face; the data system took its duties very literally. "Anne's medical people will be here in a few thousand seconds, Kal. Don't let them in till Ritser and I are finished."

"Yes, sir." There was a faint smile on the man's face as he turned and coasted out the door. Kal Omo had been through this before; he'd helped create the hoax aboard the Far Treasure. He knew what to expect.

And then he and Ritser Brughel were alone. "Okay, have you found any more bad apples, Ritser?"

Ritser was grinning; he had some surprise planned. They drifted past racks of coffins, the room light shining up from beneath their feet. The coffins had been through hell, yet they still worked reliably-the Qeng Ho ones, anyway. The Peddlers were clever; they broadcast technology throughout Human Space-yet their own goods were better than what they shouted free to the stars. But now we have a fleet library...and people to make sense of it.

"I've been running my snoops hard, Podmaster. Watch A is pretty clean, though-" He paused and stopped his coast with a hand against the rack. The slender railings flexed along the length of the rack; this really was an ad hoc setup. "-though I don't know why you put up with seditious deadwood like this." He tapped one of the coffins with his podmaster's baton.

The Peddler coffins had wide, curved windows, and an internal light. Even without the display label, Nau would have recognized Pham Trinli. Somehow, the guy looked younger when his face was inanimate.

Ritser must have taken his silence for indecision. "He knew about Diem's plot."

Nau shrugged. "Of course. So did Vinh. So did a few others. And now they're known quantities."

"But-"

"Remember, Ritser, we agreed. We can't afford any more casual wetwork." His biggest mistake of this whole adventure had been in the field interrogations after the ambush. Nau had followed the disaster-management strategies of the Plague Time, the hard strategies that were shrouded from the view of ordinary citizens. But the First Podmasters had been in a very different situation; they'd had plenty of human resources. In this situation...well, for the Qeng Ho who could be Focused, interrogation was no problem. But the others were amazingly tough. Worst of all, they didn't respond to threats in a rational way. Ritser had gotten a little crazy, and Tomas hadn't been far behind. They had killed the last of the senior Peddlers before they really understood the other side's psychology. All in all, it had been quite a debacle, but it had also been a maturing experience. Tomas had learned how to deal with the survivors.

Ritser smiled. "Okay. At least he's good for comic relief. The way he tries to suck up to you and me-and pompous at the same time!" He waved at the racked corpsicles. "Sure. Wake 'em all per schedule. We've had to explain too many 'accidents' as it is." He turned back toward Nau. He still wore a smile, but the bottom light made it look like the grimace it really was. "The real problem isn't with Watch A. Podmaster, in the last four days, I've discovered clear subversion elsewhere."

Nau stared at him with an expression of mild surprise. This was what he'd been waiting for. "Qiwi Lisolet?"

"Yes! Wait, I know you saw the face-off I had with her the other day. The pus-sucker deserves to die for that-but that's not my complaint to you. I have solid evidence she's breaking Your Law. And she is in league with others."

Nau actually was a bit surprised by this. "In what way?"

"You know I caught her in the Peddlers' park with her father. She had shut the park down on her own whim. That's what made me so angry. But afterwards...I put my snoops on her. Random monitoring might not have noticed it for several more Watches: the little slut is diverting the pod's resources. She's stolen output from the volatiles distillery. She's embezzled time from the factory. She's diverted her father's Focus to help her with private ventures."

Pestilence. This was more than Qiwi had told him about. "So...what is she doing with these resources?"

"These resources and others, Podmaster. She has a variety of plans. And she is not alone... She intends to barter these stolen goods for her own advancement."

For a moment, Nau couldn't think of what to say. Of course, bartering community resources was a crime. During most of the Plague Years, more people had been executed for barter and hoarding than had died of the Plague itself. But in modern times...well, barter could never be totally eliminated. On Balacrea, it was periodically the excuse for major exterminations-but only that, an excuse. "Ritser." Nau spoke carefully, lying: "I knew about all these activities. Certainly they are against the letter of My Law. But consider. We are twenty light-years from home. We are dealing with the Qeng Ho. They really are peddlers. I know it is hard to accept, but their whole existence revolves around cheating the community. We cannot hope to suppress that in an instant-"

"No!" Brughel pushed off the rack he had been holding, grabbed the railing next to Tomas. "They are all scum, but it is only Lisolet and a few aggravant conspirators-and I can tell you just who they are-who are violating Your Law!"

Nau could imagine how all this happened. Qiwi Lin Lisolet had never obeyed rules, even among the Qeng Ho. Her crazy mother had set her up to be manipulated, but even so the girl was beyond direct control. More that anything, she loved to play. Qiwi had once said to him, "It's always easier to get forgiveness than to get permission." As much as anything, that simple claim showed the gulf that separated Qiwi's worldview from the First Podmasters'.

It took an effort of will not to retreat before Brughel's advance. What's gotten into him? He looked straight into the other's eyes, ignoring the baton in Ritser's twitching hand. "I'm sure you could identify them. That's your job, Vice-Podmaster. And part of my job is to interpret My Law. You know that Qiwi never shook off the mindrot; if necessary, she can be easily...curbed. I want you to keep me informed of these possible infractions, but for now I choose to wink at them."

"You choose to wink at them? You choose? I-" Brughel was wordless for a second. When he continued, his voice was more controlled, a metered rage. "Yes, we're twenty light-years from home. We're twenty light-years from your family. And your uncle doesn't rule anymore." The word of Alan Nau's assassination had arrived while their expedition was still three years out of the OnOff system. "At home maybe you could break any rule, protect lawbreakers simply because they were a good lay." He slapped his baton gently against his palm. "Out here, and right now, you're very alone."

Lethal force between Podmasters was beyond any law. That was a principle dating back to the Plague Years-but it was also a basic truth of nature. If Brughel were to smash his skull now, Kal Omo would follow the Vice-Podmaster. But Nau just spoke quietly. "You are even more alone, my friend. How many of the Focused are imprinted on you?"

"I-I have Xin's pilots, I have the snoops. I could make Reynolt redirect whatever else I need."

Ritser was teetering at the edge of an abyss that Tomas hadn't noticed before, but at least he was calming down. "I think you understand Anne better than that, Ritser."

And abruptly the killing flame in Brughel was quenched. "Yeah, you're right. You're right." He seemed to crumple. "Sir...it's just that this mission has turned out so different from what I imagined. We had the resources to live like High Podmasters here. We had the prospect of finding a treasure world. Now most of our zipheads are dead. We don't have the equipment for a safe return. We're stuck here for decades..."

Ritser seemed on the verge of tears. The passage from threat to weakness was fascinating. Tomas spoke quietly, his tone comforting. "I understand, Ritser. We are in a more extreme situation than anyone has been in since the Plagues. If this is painful to one as strong as you, I am very afraid for ordinary crew of the mission." All true, though most of the crew had much less remarkable personalities than Ritser Brughel. Like Ritser, they were caught in a decades-long culde-sac in which family and children-raising were not an option. That was a dangerous problem, one that he must not overlook. But most of the ordinary folk would have no trouble continuing relationships, finding new ones; there were almost a thousand unFocused people here. Ritser's drives would be harder to satisfy. Ritser used people up, and now there were scarcely any left for him.

"But there is still the prospect of treasure-perhaps all that we hoped for. Taking the Qeng Ho nearly cost us our lives, but now we are learning their secrets. And you were at the last Watch-manager meeting: we've discovered physics that is new even to the Qeng Ho. The best is yet to come, Ritser. The Spiders are primitive now, but life could scarcely have originated here; this solar system is just too extreme. We aren't the first species that has come snooping. Imagine, Ritser: a nonhuman, starfaring civilization. Its secrets are down there, somewhere in the ruins of their past."

He guided his Vice-Podmaster around the far end of the coffin racks, and they started back along the second aisle. The head-up display reported green everywhere, though as usual the Emergent coffins were showing high wear. Sigh. In a few years, they might not have enough usable coffins to maintain a comfortable Watch schedule. By itself, a star fleet could not build another fleet, or even keep itself indefinitely provisioned with high-tech supplies. It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilization-a civilization with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry. There were no shortcuts; Humankind had often imagined, but never created, a general assembler.

Ritser seemed calmer now, his desperate anger replaced by thought. "...Okay. We sacrifice a lot, but in the end we go home winners. I can gut it out as well as any. But still...why should it take so pus long? We should land squat on some Spider kingdom and take over-"

"They've just reinvented electronics, Ritser. We need more-"

The Vice-Podmaster shook his head impatiently. "Yes, yes. Of course. We need a solid industrial base. I probably know that better than you; I was Podmaster at the Lorbita Shipyards. Nothing short of a major rebuild is going to save our ass. But there's still no reason for hiding here at L1. If we take over some Spider nation-maybe just pretend to ally with it-we could speed things up."

"True, but the real problem is maintaining control. For that, timing is everything. You know I was in on the conquest of Gaspr. The early postconquest, actually; if I'd been with the first fleet, I'd own millions now." Nau didn't keep the envy from his voice; it was a vision that Brughel would understand. Gaspr had been a jackpot. "Lord, what that first fleet did. It was just two ships, Ritser! Imagine. They had only five hundred zipheads-fewer than we have. But they sat and lurked and when Gaspr reattained the Information Age, they controlled every data system on the planet. The treasure just fell into their hands!" Nau shook his head, dismissing the vision. "Yes. We could try to take the Spiders now. It might speed things up. But it would be largely bluff on our part, against aliens that we don't understand. If we miscalculated, if we got into a guerrilla war, we could piss away everything very quickly... We'd probably 'win,' but a thirty-year wait might become five hundred. There's precedent for that sort of failure, Ritser, though it doesn't come from our Plague Time. Do you know the story of Canberra?"