Reynolt sailed across the room to Dieter Li, somehow missing techs, zipheads, and equipment. "That's bizarre. There shouldn't have been live crosstalk between physics and the radio show."

The tech tapped a card attached to Li's blouse. "His log says he heard the translation."

Pham noticed Silipan swallow hard. Could this be one of his screwups? Damn. If the man was disgraced, Pham would lose his pipeline into the Focus operation.

But Reynolt still hadn't noticed her AWOL technician. She leaned close to Dietr Li, listened for a moment to his mumbling. "You're right. He's stuck on what the Spider said about OnOff. I doubt he's suffering from real runaway. Just keep watching him; let me know if he starts looping."

More voices from the walls, and these sounded Focused: "...Attic lab twenty percent inchoate...probable cause: cross-specialty reactions to audio stream ID2738 'Children's Hour'...Instabilities are undamped..."

"I hear you, Attic. Prep for fast shutdown." Reynolt returned to Trixia Bonsol. She stared at the weeping woman, her look an eerie combination of intense interest and total detachment. Abruptly she turned, her gaze skewering Trud Silipan. "You! Get over here."

Trud bounced across the room to his boss's side. "Yes, ma'am! Yes, ma'am!" For once there was no hidden impudence. Vengeance might be unthinkable to Reynolt, but her judgments were ones that Nau and Brughel would enforce. "I was checking out the effectiveness of the translations, ma'am, how well laypersons"-namely the patrons of Benny's booze parlor-"would understand her."

The excuses were lost on Reynolt. "Get an offline team. I want Dr. Bonsol's log checked out." She leaned closer to Trixia, her gaze probing. The translator's weeping had stopped. Her body was curled in a quivering tetany. "I'm not sure if we can save this one."

Ezr Vinh twisted in Pham's grip, and for a moment it seemed he might start shouting again. Then he gave Pham a strange look and remained silent. Pham loosened his grip and gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder.

The two of them stayed silent, watching. "Patients" came and went. Several more were detuned. Xopi Reung came out of the MRI much like Trixia Bonsol. Over the last few Watches, Pham had had plenty of opportunity to watch Silipan work, and pump him about procedures. He'd even got a look at a beginning textbook on Focus. This was the first time he'd had a solid look at how Reynolt and the other technicians worked.

But something really deadly had happened here. Mindrot runaway. In attacking the problem, Reynolt came as close to emotion as Pham had ever seen her. Some parts of the mystery were solved right away. Trud's query right at the beginning of the debate had triggered a search across many specialities. That was the reason so many zipheads had been listening to the debate. Their analysis had proceeded very normally for several hundred seconds, but then as the results were posted, there was a surge in communication between the translators. Normally, that was consultative, tuning the words that they spoke aloud. This time, it was deadly nonsense. First Trixia and then most of the other translators began to drift, their brain chemistry indicating an uncontrolled excursion of the rot. Real damage had been done even before Trixia attacked Xopi Reung, but that had marked the beginning of the massive runaway. Whatever was being communicated within the ziphead net provoked a cascade of similar flareups. Before the emergency was fully appreciated, about twenty percent of all the zipheads were affected, the virus in their brains producing out of bounds, flooding them with psychoactives and frankly toxic chemicals.

The nav zipheads were not affected. Brughel's snoops were moderately affected. Pham watched everything Reynolt did, trying to absorb every detail, every clue. If I can make something like this happen to the LI support network, if Brughel's people could be disabled...

Anne Reynolt seemed to be everywhere. Every technician deferred to her. It was she who saved most of Ritser's zips; she who managed the reboot of limited Attic operations. And it came to Pham that without Anne Reynolt, there might not have been any recovery. Back in the Emergents' home solar system, ziphead crashes might be occasional inconveniences. There were universities to generate replacements, hundreds of clinics for Focusing newly created specialists. Here, twenty light-years from the Emergent civilization, it was a different story. Here, little failures could grow unbounded...and without some supernally competent manager, without Anne Reynolt, Tomas Nau's operation could collapse.

Xopi Reung flat-lined shortly after they brought her out of the MRI. Reynolt broke off from managing the Attic reboot, spent frantic moments with the translator. Here, she had no success. A hundred seconds later, the runaway infection had poisoned Reung's brain stem...and the rest didn't matter. Reynolt looked at the still body for a second more, frowning. Then she waved for the techs to float the body out.

Pham watched as Trixia Bonsol was moved out of the clinic. She was still alive; Reynolt herself was at the front of Bonsol's carrier.

Trud Silipan followed her toward the door. Suddenly he seemed to remember the two visitors. He turned and made a come-along gesture. "Okay, Trinli. End of show."

Silipan's face was grim and pale. The exact cause of the runaway was still unknown; it was some obscure interaction between the zipheads. Trud's use of the ziphead net-his query at the beginning of the debate-should have been an innocuous use of the resources. But Trud was at the pointy end of some very bad luck. Even if his query hadn't triggered the debacle, it was connected to it. In a Qeng Ho operation, Silipan's query would have just been another clue. Unfortunately, the Emergents had some very post hoc methods for defining sin.

"Are you going to be okay, Trud?"

Silipan gave a frightened little shrug and chivied them out of the clinic. "Get on back to the temp-and don't let Vinh come after his ziphead." Then he turned and followed Reynolt.

Pham and Vinh hiked up from the depths of Hammerfest, alone except for the certain presence of Brughel's snoops. The Vinh boy was quiet. In a way, today had been the biggest kick in the face he had suffered in years, maybe since Jimmy Diem's death. For an n-times-removed descendant, Ezr Vinh had a face that was entirely too familiar. He reminded Pham of Ratko Vinh when Ratko was young; he had a lot of Sura's face. That was not a pleasant thought. Maybe my subconcious is trying to tell me something... Yes. Not just in the clinic, but all this Watch. Every so often the kid would look at him...and the look was more of calculation than contempt. Pham thought back, trying to remember just how his Trinli character had behaved. Certainly it was a risk to be so interested in Focus. But he had Trud's scams as a cover for that. No, even while they were standing in the clinic and Pham's mind had been totally concentrated on Reynolt and the Bonsol mystery-even then he was sure he hadn't looked anything but mildly dazed, an old charlatan worried that this debacle would mess up the deals he and Trud had planned. Yet somehow this Vinh had seen through him. How? And what to do about it?

They came out of the main vertical corridor, and started down the ramp to the taxi locks. The Focused murals were everywhere, ceilings, walls, floors. In places, the diamond walls had been planed thirr. Blue light-the light of full Arachna-came softly through the crystal, darker or lighter depending on the depth of the carving. Because Arachna was always in full phase from L1 and the rockpile was kept in a fixed phase relative to the sun, the light had been steady for years. There might have been a time when Pham Nuwen would have fallen in love with that art, but now he knew how it had been made. Watch after Watch, he and Trud Silipan would come down this ramp and see workers, carving. Nau and Brughel had pissed away the lifetimes of nonacademic zipheads to make this art. Pham guessed that at least two had died of old age. The survivors were gone now, too, perhaps finishing the carvings on lesser corridors. After I take over, things will be different. Focus was such a terrible thing. It must never be used except for the most critical needs.

They passed a side corridor paneled in tank-grown wood. The grain swirled smoothly, following the curve of the corridor that led downward to Tomas Nau's private quarters.

And there was Qiwi Lin Lisolet. Maybe she had heard them coming. More likely she had seen their departure from the clinic. Either way, she had been waiting long enough that she stood with feet on the floor, as if in normal planetary gravity.

"Ezr, please. Can we talk, just for a moment? I never meant these shows to hurt-"

Vinh had been drifting ahead of Pham, silently pulling himself along. His head snapped up when he saw Qiwi. For an instant it seemed he might float on by her. Then she spoke. Vinh pushed hard against the wall, diving fast and directly toward her. The action was as bluntly hostile as swinging a fist at another's face.

"Here now!" Pham blustered, and forced himself to hang back in seeming impotence. He'd already waylaid the fellow once today, and this time the scene would be quite clear to the snoops. Besides, Pham had watched Qiwi work outside. She was in better condition than anyone at L1, and a natural acrobat. Maybe it would do Vinh some good to learn he couldn't off-load his anger on her.

But Qiwi didn't defend, didn't even flinch. Vinh twisted, delivering a powerful, openhanded slap that sent them spinning apart. "Yes, we'll talk!" Vinh's voice was ragged. He bounced after her and he slapped her again. And again Qiwi didn't defend, didn't even raise her hands to shield her face.

And Pham Nuwen pushed forward before he'd really thought. Something in the back of his mind was laughing at him for risking years of masquerade just to protect one innocent. But that same something also cheered.

Pham's dive turned into an apparently uncontrolled spin, one that just accidentally slammed his shoulder into Vinh's gut and smashed the younger man into the wall. Out of sight of any camera, Pham gave his opponent a piece of elbow. An instant after the impact, the back of Vinh's head smacked against the wall. If they had still been down in the carved diamond corridors, that might have caused serious injury. As it was, when Vinh came off the wall, his arms were flailing weakly. Little droplets of blood sprouted up from the back of his head.

"Pick on someone your own size, Vinh! Cowardly, scummy piece of vermin. You Great Family Traders are all alike." Pham's rage was real-but it was also rage against himself, for risking his cover.

The wits slowly percolated back into Vinh's eyes. He glanced at Qiwi, four meters down the hallway. The girl looked back, her expression a strange combination of shock and determination. And then Vinh looked at Pham, and the old man felt a chill. Maybe Brughel's cameras hadn't caught all the details of the fight, but the kid knew how calculated Pham's assault had been. For an instant the two stared at each other, and then Vinh shrugged free of his grasp and scooted back down the ramp toward the taxi locks. It was the scuttling retreat of a shamed and beaten man. But Pham had seen the look in his eyes; something would have to be done about Ezr Vinh.

Qiwi started after Vinh, but dragged herself to a stop before she had gone ten meters. She floated in the T of the corridors, staring off in the direction Vinh had gone.

Pham came near. He knew he had to get out of here. No doubt several cameras were watching him now, and he was just no good at staying in character around Qiwi. So what to say that would get him safely gone? "Don't worry, kid. Vinh is just not worth it. He won't bother you again; I guarantee it."

After a moment, the girl turned to face him. Lord, she looked so much like her mother; Nau had been running her nearly Watch-on-Watch. There were tears in her eyes. He couldn't see any cuts or blood, but bruises were beginning to show on her dark skin. "I really didn't meant to hurt him. God, I don't know what I'll do if Trixia d-dies." Qiwi brushed back her close-cut black hair. Grown-up or not, she looked as lost as during the first days after the Diem "atrocity." She was so alone she would confide in a windbag like Pham Trinli. "When...when I was little, I admired Ezr Vinh more than anyone in the universe, except my parents." She glanced at Pham; her smile was tremulous and hurt. "I wanted so much for him to think well of me. And then the Emergents attacked us, and then Jimmy Diem killed my mother and all the others... We are all in a very small lifeboat. We can't have any more killing." She gave her head a sharp little shake. "Did you know that Tomas has not used coldsleep since the Diem massacre? He's lived every second of all these years. Tomas is so serious, so hardworking. He believes in Focus, but he's open to new ways of doing things." She was telling him what she had wanted to tell Ezr. "Benny's parlor wouldn't exist without Tomas. None of the trading and bonsai would exist. Little by little we are making the Emergents understand our ways. Someday, Tomas will be able to release my father and Trixia and all the Focused. Someday-"

Pham wanted to reach out and comfort her. Pham Nuwen might be the only living person besides the murderers who knew what had really happened to Jimmy Diem, and who knew what Nau and Brughel were doing with Qiwi Lin Lisolet. He should give her a gruff brush-off and leave, but somehow he couldn't do that. Instead he hung in place, looking embarrassed and confused. Yes. Someday. Someday, child, you will be avenged.

TWENTY-SIX.

Ritser Brughel's quarters and command post were aboard the Invisible Hand. He often wondered how the Peddlers had come up with such a perfect name, in two words expressing the essence of Security. In any case, the Hand was the most nearly undamaged of all the hulls, Qeng Ho or Emergent. The flight-crew quarters were sound. The main drive could probably sustain a one-gee thrust for several days. Since the takeover, the Hand's comm and ECM had been refurbished to Focused standards. Here on the Invisible Hand, he was something of a god.

Unfortunately, physical isolation was no protection against a mindrot runaway. Runaway was triggered by emotional imbalance in the Focused mind. That meant it could propagate across communications networks, though normally that only happened between closely cooperating zipheads. Back in civilization, runaway was a constant, low-level concern, just another reason for having hot swaps available. Here in the godforsaken nowhere, it was a deadly threat. Ritser had been aware of the runaway almost as quickly as Reynolt-but he couldn't afford to shut down his zips. As usual, Reynolt gave him second-class service, but he managed. They split the snoops into small groups, and ran each separately from the others. The resulting intelligence was fragmented; their logs would require lots of later analysis. But they had missed nothing big...and eventually they would catch up with all the details.

In the first 20Ksec, Ritser lost three snoops to the runaway. He had Omo flush them and keep the others running. He went down to Hammerfest, had a long meeting with Tomas Nau. It looked like Reynolt was going to lose at least six people, including a big hunk of her translation department. The Senior Podmaster was properly impressed with Brughel's lower casualties. "Keep your people online, Ritser. Anne thinks the translators chose sides in that damn Spider debate, that the runaway rot was an escalation of a normal ziphead disagreement. Maybe so, but the debate was well removed from center of the translators' Focus. Once things stabilize, I want you to go over every second of your records, comb it for suspicious events."

After another 60Ksec, Brughel and Nau agreed that the crisis was past, at least for the Security zips. Podsergeant Omo put the snoops back into consultation with Reynolt's people, but via a buffered link. He began a detailed scan of the immediate past. The debacle had indeed blown away Ritser's operation, albeit very briefly. For about one thousand seconds, they had totally lost emission security. Closer investigation showed that nothing had been beamed toward any outside system; their long-term secrecy was intact. Locally, the translators had screamed something past the controllers, but the Spiders had not noticed; not surprising, since the chaotic transmissions would have seemed like transient noise.

In the end, Ritser was forced to conclude that the runway was simply very bad luck. But amid the trivia there were some very interesting tidbits: Normally Ritser stayed up on the Hand's bridge, where he could maintain a command perspective on the L1 rubble pile and Arachna far beyond. But with Ciret and Marli helping out on Hammerfest, there were just Tan and Kal Omo to run nearly one hundred Security snoops. So today he was mucking around in the guts of the operation with Omo and Tan.

"Vinh has tripped three flags this Watch, Podmaster. Two times during the runaway, as matter of fact."

As he floated in over Omo, Ritser glanced down at the zipheads on Watch. About a third were asleep in their saddles. The rest were immersed in data streams, reviewing the logs, correlating their results with Reynolt's Focused on Hammerfest. "Okay, so what do you have on him?"

"This is camera analysis of Reynolt's lab and a corridor near Podmaster Nau's residence." The scenes flickered by quickly, highlighted where the snoops had seen exceptionable body language.

"Nothing overt?"

Omo's hatchetlike face spread in a humorless smile. "Plenty that would be actionable back home, but not under the current RoE."

"I'll bet." Podmaster Nau's Rules of Enforcement would have been reason for his instant removal anywhere in the Emergency. For more than twenty years, the Senior Podmaster had let the Peddler swine get away with their excesses, perverting law-abiding Followers in the process. It had driven Ritser to distraction at first. Now...Now he could understand. Tomas was right about so many things. They had no margin for further destruction. And letting people talk yielded a lot of information, secrets they could use when the noose was retightened. "So what's different about this time?"

"Analysts Seven and Eight both correlate on the last two events." Seven and Eight were the zipheads at the end of the first row. As children they might have had names, but that was long ago and before they entered the Police Academy. Frivolous names and "Doctor" titles might be used in civilian work, but not in a serious police shop. "Vinh is intent on something that goes beyond his normal anxiety. Look at this head tracking."

It didn't mean anything to Ritser, but then his job was to lead, not to understand forensic details. Omo continued, "He's watching Trinli with great suspicion. It happens again in the corridor by the taxi locks."

Brughel riffled through the video index of Vinh's visit to Hammerfest. "Okay. He fought Trinli. He harassed Trud Silipan. Lordy-" Brughel couldn't help laughing. "-he assaulted Tomas Nau's private whore. But you say the security flags are for eye contact and body language?"

Omo shrugged. "The overt behavior fits with the guy's known problems, sir. And it doesn't come under the RoE."

So Qiwi Lisolet got slapped around, right on Tomas's doorstep. Ritser found himself grinning at the irony. All these years, Tomas had fooled the little slut. The periodic mindscrubs had come to be a bright spot in Ritser's life, especially since he saw her reaction to a certain video. Still, he couldn't deny his envy. He, Ritser Brughel, couldn't have maintained a masquerade, even with mindscrubs. Ritser's own women just didn't last. A couple of times a year, he had go back to Tomas and wheedle more playthings out of him. Ritser had used up the most attractive expendables. Sometimes he had a bit of luck, as with Floria Peres. She would have noticed Qiwi's mindscrub for sure; chemical engineer or no, she had to be taken down. But there were limits to such good fortune...and the Exile stretched out years more ahead of him. The thought was dark and familiar, and he resolutely pushed it away.

"Okay. So your point is, Seven and Eight figure that Vinh is hiding something that wasn't in his consciousness before-at least not at this level of intensity."

Back in civilization, there'd have been no problem. They'd just bring the perp in and cut the answers out of him. Here...well, they'd had their chance to do some cutting; they had learned disappointingly little. Too many of the Qeng Ho had effective blocks, and too many couldn't be properly infected with mindrot.

He cycled through the highlighted incidents. "Hmm. Do you suppose he's figured out that Trinli is really Zamle Eng?" The Peddlers were crazy; they tolerated almost any corruption, but had blood hatred for one of their own simply because he traded in flesh. Ritser's lip turned in disgust. Pus. How far we've fallen. Blackmail was a fitting weapon between Podmasters, but simple terror should suffice for people like Pham Trinli. He scanned once more through Omo's evidence. It was really frail. "Sometimes I wonder, maybe we have the trigger threshold set too low on our snoops."

That was something that Omo had suggested before. The podsergeant was too clever to gloat, however. "It's possible, sir. On the other hand, if there weren't questions left for managers to decide, there would be no need for real people." The vision of one Podmaster ruling a universe of Focused was fantasy fiction. "You know what I wish, Podmaster Brughel?"

"What?"

"I wish we could bring those run-alone Qeng Ho localizers aboard Hammerfest. There's something perverse about having worse security in our own space than we do in the Qeng Ho temp. If these incidents had happened aboard the temp, we would have had Vinh's blood pressure, his heart rate-hell, if the localizers are on the subject's scalp, we'd have EEG. Between the Peddlers' signal processors and our zipheads, we could practically read the subject's bloody mind."

"Yeah, I know." The Qeng Ho localizers were an almost magical improvement over previous standards of law enforcement. There were hundreds of thousands of the millimeter-size devices all through the Peddler temp-probably hundreds in the open areas of Hammerfest since Nau had relaxed the frat rules. All they had to do was reprogram Hammerfest's utility system for pulsed microwave, and the localizers' reach would be instantly extended. They could say goodbye to camera patches and similar clumsy gear. "I'll bring this up again with Podmaster Nau." Anne's programmers had been studying the Peddler localizers for more than two years, futilely searching for hidden gotchas.

In the meantime..."Well, Ezr Vinh is back aboard the temp now, with all the localizer coverage you could dream of." He grinned at Omo. "Divert a couple more zipheads onto him. Let's see how much an intense analysis can show."

Ezr got through the emergency without cracking up again. Regular reports emerged from Hammerfest. The mindrot runaway had been stopped. Xopi Reung and eight other Focused persons had died. Three more were "seriously damaged." But Trixia was marked as "returned to service, undamaged."

The speculations swept back and forth across Benny's parlor. Rita was sure the runaway was a near-random crash. "We used to get them every couple of years in my shop on Balacrea; only one time did we nail the cause. It's the price you pay for close-coupling." But she and Jau Xin were afraid the runaway would eliminate even delayed audio translations of "The Children's Hour." Gonle Fong said that didn't matter, that Sherkaner Underhill had lost his strange debate with Pedure and so there wouldn't be any more broadcasts to translate. Trud Silipan was gone from the discussion; he was still over on Hammerfest, maybe working for a change. Pham Trinli made up for that, spouting Silipan's theory that Trixia had been acting out a real fight-and that had precipitated the runaway. Ezr listened to it all, numb and silent.

His next duty was in 40Ksec; Ezr went back to his quarters early. It would be a while before he could face Benny's again. So many things had happened, and they were all shameful or hurting or lethally mysterious. He floated in the semidarkness of his room, skewered on Hell's rotisserie. He'd think impotently on one problem for a time...and then escape to something that soon was equally terrible, and then escape again...finally returning to the first horror.

Qiwi. That was his shame. He had struck her twice. Hard. If Pham Trinli had not interfered, would I have gone on beating her? There was a horror opening up before him that he had never imagined. Sure, he had always been afraid that someday he would blunder, or even be a coward, but...today he had seen something in himself, something basically indecent. Qiwi had helped to put Trixia on exhibit. Sure. But she wasn't the only one involved. And yes, Qiwi did benefit under Tomas Nau...but Lord, she'd been only a child when all this began. So why did I go after her? Because she had once seemed to care? Because she wouldn't fight back? That was what the implacable voice in the back of his mind insisted. At bottom, maybe Ezr Vinh was not just incompetent or weak, maybe he was simply filth. Ezr's mind danced round and round that conclusion, closing ever tighter, until he escaped out sideways to- Pham Trinli. That was the mystery. Trinli had acted twice yesterday, both times saving Ezr from being an even greater fool and villain. There was a crust of blood across the back of his head, where Trinli's "clumsy" body block had smashed him into the wall. Ezr had seen Trinli in the temp's gym. The old man made a thing of exercise, but his body wasn't in especially good shape. His reaction time was nothing spectacular. But somehow he knew how to move, how to make accidents happen. And thinking back, Ezr remembered times before when Pham Trinli had been in the right place... The temp park right after the massacre. What had the old man actually said? It hadn't revealed anything to the cameras, it hadn't even tweaked Ezr's own attention-but something he said had wakened the certainty that Jimmy Diem had been murdered, that Jimmy was innocent of all Nau claimed. Everything Pham did was loud and self-serving and incompetent, yet...Ezr thought back and forth over all the details, the things he might be seeing that others would miss. Maybe he was seeing mirages in his desperation. When problems go beyond hope of solution, insanity comes creeping. And yesterday, something had broken inside him...

Trixia. That was the pain and the rage and the fear. Yesterday Trixia had come very close to death, her body as tortured and twisted as Xopi Reung's. Maybe even worse... He remembered the look on her face when she came out of the MRI programmer. Trud said her linguistics ability had been temporarily detuned. Maybe that was the cause for her desperation, losing the one thing that still had meaning for her. And maybe he lied, as he suspected Reynolt and Nau and Brughel lied about many things. Maybe Trixia had been briefly deFocused and looked about her, and seen how she had aged, and realized that they had taken her life. And I may never know. I will continue to watch her year after year, impotent and raging and...silent. There had to be someone to strike against, to punish...

And so the rotisserie cycled back to Qiwi.

Two Ksec passed, four. Enough time to return again and again to problems that were beyond solution. This sort of thing had happened a few terrible times before. Sometimes he'd spend the whole night on the rotisserie. Sometimes he got so tired, he'd just fall asleep-and that would stop it. Tonight, the nth time thinking on Pham Trinli, Ezr got angry at the process. So what if he was crazy? If all he had were mirages of salvation, well then, grab them! Vinh got up and put on his huds. Awkward seconds were spent getting through the library access routines. He still wasn't used to the crummy Emergent I/O interface, and they had yet to enable decent customization. But then the windows around him lit up with text from the latest report he was doing for Nau.

So, what did he know about Pham Trinli? In particular, what did he know that had escaped the notice of Nau and Brughel? The fellow had an uncanny ability in hand-to-hand fighting-mugging, more accurately. And he cloaked the ability from the Emergents; he was playing a game with them... And after today, he must know that Vinh knew this.

Maybe Trinli was simply an aging criminal doing his best to blend in and survive. But then what about the localizers? Trinli had revealed their secret to Tomas Nau, and that secret had increased Nau's power a hundredfold. The tiny flecks of automation were everywhere. There on his knuckle-that might be a glint of sweat, but it also might be a localizer. The little glints and flecks could be reporting the position of his arms, some of his fingers, the angle of his head. Nau's snoops could know it all.

Those capabilities were simply not documented in the fleet library, even with top-level passwords. So Pham Trinli knew secrets that went deep in the Qeng Ho past. And very likely what he had revealed to Tomas Nau was just a cover for...what?

Ezr pounded on that question for a few moments, got nowhere. Think about the man. Pham Trinli. He was an old thug. He knew important secrets above the level of Qeng Ho fleet secrets. Most likely, he had been in at the founding of the modern Qeng Ho, when Pham Nuwen and Sura Vinh and the Council of the Gap had done their work. So Trinli was enormously old in objective years. That was not impossible, nor even excessively rare. Long trading missions could take a Trader across a thousand years of objective time. His parents had had one or two friends who had actually walked on Old Earth. Yet it was highly unlikely any of them had access to the founding layers of Qeng Ho automation.

No, if Trinli was what Ezr's insane reasoning implied, then he would likely be a figure visible in the histories. Who?

Vinh's fingers tapped at the keyboard. His ongoing assignment was a good cover for the questions he wanted to ask. Nau had an insatiable interest in everything Qeng Ho. Vinh was to write him summaries, and propose research tracks for the zipheads. However mellow and diplomatic he might seem, Ezr had long ago realized that Nau was even crazier than Brughel. Nau studied in order to someday rule.

Be careful. The places he really wanted to look must be fully covered by the needs of his report writing. On top of it all, he must keep up a random pattern of truly irrelevant references. Let the snoops try to find his intent in those!

He needed a list: Qeng Ho males, alive at the beginning of the modern Qeng Ho, who were not known to be dead at the time Captain Park's expedition left Triland. The list shrank substantially when he also eliminated those known to be far from this corner of Human Space. It shrank again when he required that they be present at Brisgo Gap. The conjunction of five booleans, the work of a spoken command or a column of keystrokes-but Ezr could not afford such simplicity. Each boolean was part of other searches, in support of things he really needed for the report. The results were scattered across pages of analysis, a name here, a name there. The orrery floating by the ceiling showed less than 15Ksec remaining before the walls of his quarters would begin to glow dawnlight...but he had his list. Did it mean anything? A handful of names, some pale and improbable. The booleans themselves were very hazy. The Qeng Ho interstellar net was an enormous thing, in a sense the largest structure in the histories of Humankind. But it was all out of date, by years or centuries. And even the Qeng Ho sometimes lied among themselves, especially where the distances were short and confusion could give commercial advantage. A handful of names. How many and who? Even scanning the list was painstakingly slow, else the hidden watchers would surely notice. Some names he recognized: Tran Vinh.21, that was Sura Vinh's g'grandson and the male-side founder of Ezr's own branch of the Vinh Family; King Xen.03, Sura's chief armsman at Brisgo Gap. Xen could not have been Trinli. He was just over 120 centimeters tall, and nearly as wide. Other names belonged to people who had never been famous. Jung, Trap, Park...Park?

Vinh couldn't help the surprise. If Brughel's zipheads reviewed the records, they would surely notice. The damn localizers could probably pick up on pulse, maybe even blood pressure. If they can see the surprise, make it a big thing. "Lord of All Trade," Vinh whispered, bringing the picture and bio material up on all his windows. It really did look like their own S. J. Park, Fleet Captain of the mission to the OnOff star. He remembered the man from his own childhood; that Park hadn't seemed so very old... In fact, some of this biodata seemed vague. And the DNA record did not match the latter-day Park. Hmm. That might be enough to deflect Nau and Reynolt; they didn't have Ezr's firsthand experience with backstairs Family affairs. But the S. J. Park at Brisgo Gap-two thousand years ago-had been a ship's captain. He'd ended up with Ratko Vinh. There had been some weird scandal involving a failed marriage contract. After that, there was nothing.

Vinh followed a couple of obvious leads on Park-then gave up, the way you might when you learned something surprising but not universe-breaking. The other names on the list...it took him another Ksec to get through them, and none looked familiar. His mind kept returning to S. J. Park, and he almost panicked. How well can the enemy read me? He looked at some pictures of Trixia, surrendered to the familiar pain; he did that often enough just before finally going to bed. Behind his tears, his mind raced. If Ezr was right about Park, he went way, way back. No wonder his parents had treated Park as more than a young contract captain. Lord, he could have been on Pham Nuwen's voyage to the far side. After Brisgo Gap, when Nuwen was about as rich as he'd ever been, he'd departed with a grand fleet, heading for the far side of Human Space. That was typical of Nuwen's gestures. The far side was at least four hundred light-years away. The merchanting details of its environment were ancient history by the time they arrived on this side. And his proposed path would take him through some of the oldest regions of Human Space. For centuries after the departure, the Qeng Ho Net continued to report the progress of the Prince of Canberra, of his fleets growing and sometimes shrinking. Then the stories faltered, often lacked valid authentication. Nuwen probably never got more than partway to his goal. As a child, Ezr and his friends had often played at being the Lost Prince. There were so many ways it might have ended, some adventurous and gruesome, some-the most likely-involving old age and a string of business failures, ships lost to bankruptcy across dozens of light-years. And so the fleet had never returned.

But parts of it might have. A person here or there, perhaps losing heart with a voyage that would take them forever far from their own time. Who knew just which individuals returned? Very likely, S. J. Park had known. Very likely S. J. Park had known precisely who Pham Trinli was-and had worked to protect that identity. Who from the era of Brisgo Gap could be so important, so well known...? S. J. Park had been loyal to someone from that era. Who?

And then Ezr remembered hearing that Captain Park had personally chosen the name of his flagship. The Pham Nuwen.

Pham Trinli. Pham Nuwen. The Lost Prince of Canberra.

And I have finally gone totally crazy. There were library checks that would shoot down this conclusion in a second. Yes, and that would disprove nothing; if he were right, the library itself would be a subtle lie. Yeah, sure. This was the sort of desperate hallucination he must guard against. If you raise your desires high enough, certainty can grow out of the background noise. But at least it got me off the rotisserie!

It was awfully late. He stared at the pictures of Trixia for a while longer, lost in sad memories. Inside, he calmed down. There would be other false alarms, but he had years ahead of him, a lifetime of patient looking. He would find a crack in the dungeon somewhere, and when it happened he wouldn't have to wonder if it was a trick of his imagination.

Sleep came, and dreams filled with all the usual distress and the new shame, and now mixed with his latest insanity. Eventually there was something like peace, floating in the dark of his cabin. Mindless.

And then another dream, so real that he didn't doubt it until it was over. Little lights were shining in his eyes, but only when he kept his eyes closed. Awake and sitting, the room was dark as ever. Lying down, eyes asleep, then the sparkles started again.

The lights were talking to him, a game of blinkertalk. When he was very young he had played a lot of that, flitting from rock to rock across the out-of-doors. Tonight, a single pattern repeated and repeated, and in Vinh's dream state the meaning formed almost effortlessly: "NOD UR HEAD IF U UNDRSTND ME... NOD-"

Vinh made a wordless groan of surprise-and the pattern changed: "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP..." for a long time. And then it changed again. "NOD UR HEAD IF U UNDRSTND ME..."

That was easy too. Vinh moved his head a fraction of a centimeter.

"OK. PRETEND TO BE ASLEEP. CLOSE UR HAND. BLINK ON PALM."

After all the years, conspiracy was suddenly so easy. Just pretend your palm was a keyboard and type at your fellow-conspirators. Of course! His hands were under the covers, so no one else could see! He would have laughed out loud at the cleverness, except that would be out of character. It was so obvious now who had come to save them. He closed his right hand and tapped: "HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?"

For a long time there were no more little flashes. Ezr's mind drifted slowly toward deeper sleep.

Then: "U NU BFR TNITE? DAM ME." Another long pause. "I VRY SORRY. I THOT U BROKN."

Vinh nodded to himself, a little proud. And maybe someday Qiwi would forgive him, and Trixia would return to life, and...

"OK," Ezr tapped at the Prince. "HOW MNY PEOPLE WE GOT?"

"SECRET. ONLY I KNO. EACH CAN TALK BUT NO ONE KNOS ANYONE ELSE." Pause. "TILL U TONITE."

Aha. Almost the perfect conspiracy. The members could cooperate, but no one but the Prince could betray anyone else. Things would be so much easier now.

"WELL IM VRY TIRED NOW. WANNA SLEEP. WE CAN TALK MORE LATR."