"Hardly a visible difference."

"Oh sir, you don't know. When you are Trinli, all the little things are different. Here, even in this light, you look different. If Nau or Reynolt saw you for even ten seconds, they would know, too."

The kid had an overactive imagination. "Well, the only thing they're seeing for the next two thousand seconds is the lies my localizers are feeding them. Hopefully, that's long enough to get you started-"

"Yes! You can actually see with the localizers, you can actually input commands to them?"

"With enough practice." He showed the boy where to set localizer grains around the orbit of his eye, and how to cue the nearby localizers to cooperate. "Don't do that in public. The synthesized beam is very narrow, but might still be noticed."

Vinh stared as if sightless. "Ah, it's like something is nibbling at the back of my eyes."

"The localizers are tickling your optic nerve directly. What pops up may be very weird at first. You can learn the commands with some simple exercises, but learning to make sense of the visual tickle...well, I guess that's like learning to see again." Pham guessed it was a lot like a blind man learning to use a visual prosthesis. Some people could do it, some remained blind. He didn't say that out loud. Instead, he led Ezr through some test patterns, patterns that Vinh could practice with.

Pham had thought a lot about just how much of the command interface to show the Vinh boy. But Ezr already knew enough to betray him. Short of killing him, there was no cure for that. All the bloody clues I laid, pointing at the Zamle Eng story, and he still picked up on the truth. Pray it was only his Great Family background that made that possible. Pham had kept him in ignorance for years now, watching for signs of counterscheming, trying to measure the boy's actual ability. What he had seen was a compulsive, unsure adolescent coming of age in a tyranny-and still retaining some sense.

When the crunch came, when Pham finally moved against Nau and Brughel, he would need someone to help pull all the strings. The boy should be taught some of the tricks...but there were nights Pham ground his teeth, thinking of the power he was handing to a Vinh.

Ezr learned the command set very quickly. Now he should have no trouble learning the other techniques that Pham had opened for him. Full vision would come slowly, but- "Yes, I know you still can't see more than flashes of light. Just keep trying the test patterns. In a few Msecs, you'll be as good as I am." Almost as good.

Just the assurance seemed to calm the boy. "Okay, I'll practice and practice-all in my room, as you say. This makes me feel...I don't know, like I've accomplished more just now than I have in years."

One hundred seconds of the alloted time remained. The masking that disguised them to the snoops couldn't be aborted. Never mind. Just react to the kid naturally. Platitudes. "You did plenty in the past. Together, we've learned a lot about the Hammerfest operation."

"Yes, but this will be different... What will things be like after we win, sir?"

"Afterwards?" What not to say? "It will be...magnificent. We will have Qeng Ho technology and a planetary civilization very nearly capable of using it. By itself, that is the most powerful trading position any Qeng Ho has ever had. But we will have more. Given time, we'll have ramdrives that take advantage of what we've learned from OnOff's physics. And you know the DNA diversity on Arachna. That by itself is an enormous treasure, a box of surprises that could power-"

"And all the Focused will be set free."

"Yes, yes. Of course. Don't worry, Vinh, we'll get Trixia back." That was an expensive promise, but one Pham intended to keep. With Trixia Bonsol free, maybe Vinh would listen to reason about the rest. Maybe.

Pham realized that the boy was looking at him strangely; he had let the silence stretch into unwelcome implications. "Okay. I think we've covered the ground. Practice the input language and the visual test patterns. For now, our time is up." Thank the Lord of All Trade. "You take off first, back the way you came. The cover story is you got almost to the taxi port, then decided to go back to the dayroom for breakfast."

"Okay." Vinh hesitated an instant, as if wanting to say more. Then he turned and floated back around the curve of the inner balloon.

Pham watched the timer that hung at the back of his vision. In twenty seconds, he would depart in the other direction. The localizers had fed two thousand seconds of carefully planned lies back to Brughel's snoops. Later, Pham would check it over for consistency with what was really going on throughout the rest of the temp. There would be some patching necessary, no doubt. This kind of meeting would have been easy if the enemy had been ordinary analysts. With ziphead snoops, covering your ass was a major exercise in paranoia.

Ten seconds. He stared into the dimness at where Ezr Vinh had just disappeared. Pham Nuwen had a lifetime of experience in diplomacy and deception. So why the bloody hell wasn't I smoother with the kid? The ghost of Sura Vinh seemed suddenly very close, and she was laughing.

"You know, we really need to get localizers aboard Hammerfest." The request had become a ritual at the beginning of Ritser Brughel's security briefings. Today, maybe Ritser was in for a surprise.

"Anne's people haven't finished their evaluation."

The Vice-Podmaster leaned forward. Over the years, Ritser had changed more than most. Nowadays, he was on-Watch almost fifty percent, but he was also making heavy use of medical support and the Hammerfest gym. He actually looked healthier than he had during the early years. And somewhere along the way, he had learned to satisfy his...needs...without producing an unending stream of dead zipheads. He had grown to be a dependable Podmaster. "Have you seen Reynolt's latest report, sir?"

"Yes. She's saying five more years." Anne's search for security holes in the Peddler localizers was close to impossible. In the early years, Tomas had been more hopeful. After all, the Qeng Ho security hackers had had no ziphead support. But the quagmire of Qeng Ho software was almost eight thousand years deep. Every year, Anne's zipheads pushed back their deadline for certainty another year or two. And now this latest report.

"Five more years, sir. She might as well be saying 'never.' We both know how unlikely it is that these localizers are a danger. My zipheads have been using them for twelve years on the temp and in the junked starships. My zips aren't programmer specialists, but I'll tell you, in all that time the localizers have come up as clean as anything Qeng Ho. These gadgets are so useful, sir. Nothing gets past them. Not using them has its own risks."

"Such as?"

Nau saw the other's faint start of surprise; this was more encouragement than Ritser had received in some time. "Um. Such as the things we miss because we aren't using them. Let's just look at the current briefing." There followed a not-too-relevant discourse on all the recent security concerns: Gonle Fong's attempts to acquire automation for her black-market farms; the perverse affection people of all factions had developed for the Spiders-a desirable sublimation, but a potential problem when the time for real action finally arrived; the proper level for Anne's paranoia. "I know you monitor her, sir, but I think she's drifting. It's not just this fixation about system trapdoors. She's become significantly more possessive of 'her' zipheads."

"It's possible I've tuned her too edgy." Anne's suspicions about sabotaged zipheads were totally amorphous, quite unlike her usual analytical precision. "But what does that have to do with enabling localizers in Hammerfest?"

"With localizer support in Hammerfest, my snoops could do constant, fine-grain analysis-correlate the net traffic with exactly what is happening physically. It's...it's a scandal that our weakest security is in the place where we need the strongest."

"Hmm." He looked back into Ritser's eyes. As a child, Tomas Nau had learned an important rule: Whatever else, never lie to yourself. Throughout history, self-deception had ruined great men from Helmun Dire to Pham Nuwen. Be honest: He really really wanted the lake that Qiwi had shown him under Hammerfest. With such a park, he would have made something of this squalor, a splendor that the Qeng Ho rarely exceeded even in civilized systems. All that was no excuse to break security-but maybe his self-denial was itself making things worse. Take a different tack: Who appears to be pushing this? Ritser Brughel was awfully enthusiastic about it. He must not be underestimated. Less directly, Qiwi had created this dilemma: "What about Qiwi Lisolet, Ritser? What do your analysts say about her?"

Something glittered in Ritser's eyes. He still held a homicidal hatred for Qiwi. "We both know how fast she can twig the truth-close surveillance is more important than ever. But at the moment, she's absolutely, totally clean. She doesn't love you, but her admiration for you is nearly as strong as love. She is a masterpiece, sir."

Qiwi was twigging about every other Watch now. But her last scrubbing was very recent-and extending the localizer coverage would keep her under an even tighter watch. Nau thought it over for a moment more, then nodded. "Okay, Vice-Podmaster, let's bring the localizers to Hammerfest."

Of course, the Qeng Ho localizers were already aboard Hammerfest. The dustlike motes spread on air currents, stuck to clothes and hair and even skin. They were ubiquitous throughout all inhabited spaces around the rockpile.

Ubiquitous they might be, but without power the localizers were harmless pieces of metallic glass. Now Anne's people reprogrammed Hammerfest's cable spines-and extended them into the newly dug caves beneath. Now, ten times a second, microwaves pulsed in every open space. The energy was far below biological-damage thresholds, so low that it didn't interfere with the other utilities in place. The Qeng Ho localizers didn't need much power, just enough to run their tiny sensors and communicate with their nearest neighbors. Ten Ksec after the microwave pulses were turned on, Ritser reported that the net had stabilized and was providing good data. Millions of processors, scattered across a diameter of four hundred meters. Each was scarcely more powerful than a Dawn Age computer. In principle, they were the most powerful computer net at L1.

In four days, Qiwi finished digging out the cave, and emplaced the wave servos. Her father was already brewing soil on the uplands. The water would come last, but it would come.

After the fact, Nau wondered how they had managed without the localizers all this time. Ritser Brughel had been absolutely correct. Before, their security had been all but blind in Hammerfest. Before, the Qeng Ho temp had in fact been a safer place for secure operations. Nau supervised Brughel and his snoops in a thorough, many-day sweep of all Hammerfest, and then of the starships and the warehouse cloud. He even broke with tradition and ran the localizers for 100Ksec in the L1-A arsenal vault. It was like shining a spotlight into dark places. They found and closed dozens of security lapses...and found not a single trace of subversion. Altogether, the experience was a wonderful confidence builder, as when you check for house parasites, find none, but also see where to put poison and barriers against future infestation.

And now, Tomas Nau had greater knowledge of his own domain than any Podmaster in Emergent history. Ritser's snoops, using the localizers, could give Nau the location and emotional state-even cognitive state-of anyone in Hammerfest. After a time, he realized that there were experiments he should have undertaken long before.

Ezr Vinh. Maybe something more could be done with him. Nau studied the fellow's biography again. At the next briefing, he was ready. This was Vinh's standard meeting time. It was just the two of them, but by this time the Peddler was very used to the interaction. Vinh showed up at Nau's office to discuss his summaries for the last ten days, the progress he was seeing with the ziphead groups in their understanding of the Spider world.

Tomas let the Peddler rattle on. He listened, nodded, asked the reasonable questions...and watched the analysis that spread across his huds. Lordy. The localizers in the air, on Vinh's chair, even on his skin, reported to the Invisible Hand, where programs analyzed and sent the results back to Nau's huds, painting Vinh's skin with colors that showed galvanic response, skin temperature, perspiration. Standard graphics around the face showed pulse and other internals. An inset window showed what Vinh was seeing from his place across the desk, and mapped his every eye motion with red tracks. Two of Brughel's snoops were allocated to this interview, and their analysis was a flowing legend across the top of Nau's vision. Subject is relaxed to tenth percentile of normal interview level. Subject is confident but wary, without sympathy for the Podmaster. Subject is not currently trying to suppress explicit thought.

It was more or less what Nau would have guessed, but with a wealth of added detail, better than the best instrumented soft interrogation, since it was invisible to the subject.

"So the strategic politics are much clearer now," concluded Vinh, blissfully unaware of the dual nature of the interview. "Pedure and the Kindred have some real advantages in rocketry and nuclear weapons, but they've consistently lagged behind the Accord in computing and networks."

Nau shrugged. "The Kindred are a strict dictatorship. Haven't you told me that the Dawn Age tyrannies couldn't cope with computer networks?"

"Yes." Subject reacts, suppressing probable feeling of irony. "That's part of it. We know they're planning on a first strike sometime after the sun goes out, so that accounts for their overspending on weapons. And on the Accord side, Sherkaner Underhill is just so enthusiastic about automation that Pedure can't keep up. Frankly, I think we're headed for a crunch, Podmaster." The subject is sincere in this statement. "Spider civilization only discovered the inverse square law a couple of generations ago; their mathematics lagged behind our Dawn Age accordingly. But the Kindred have made solid progress in rocketry. If they show one-tenth the curiosity of Sherkaner Underhill, they're going to detect us in less than ten years."

"Before we can completely control their networks?"

"Yes, sir."

That's what Jau Xin had been saying, reasoning off of his pilot zipheads. A pity. But at least the shape of the end of the Exile was becoming clear... Meantime: Subject's guard is down. Nau smiled to himself. This was as good a time as any to shake up Manager Vinh. Who knows, maybe I can actually manipulate him. Either way, Vinh's reaction would be interesting. Nau leaned back in his chair, pretended to gaze idly at the bonsai floating over his desk. "I've had years to study the Qeng Ho, Mr. Vinh. I'm not under false illusions. You people understand the different ways of civilization better than any sessile group."

"Yes, sir." Subject still calm, but the comment brings sincere agreement.

Nau cocked his head. "You're in the Vinh line; if any in the Qeng Ho really understand things, it should be you. You see, one of my personal heroes has always been Pham Nuwen."

"You've...mentioned that before." The words were wooden. In Nau's display, Vinh's face was transformed by color, his pulse and perspiration spiking. Somewhere over on the Hand, the snoops analyzed, and reported: Subject feels substantial anger directed at the Podmaster. "Honestly, Mr. Vinh, I'm not trying to insult your traditions. You know that Emergents hold much of the Qeng Ho culture in contempt, but Pham Nuwen is a different matter. You see...I know the truth about Pham Nuwen."

The diagnostic colors were shading toward normalcy, as was Vinh's heart rate. His eye dilation and tracking were consistent with suppressed anger. Nau felt a fleeting incongruity; he would have read a tinge of fear in Vinh's reaction. Maybe I have some things to learn from all this automation. And now he was frankly puzzled: "What's the matter, Mr. Vinh? For once, let's be frank." He smiled. "I won't tell Ritser, and you won't gossip with Xin or Liao or...my Qiwi."

The pulse of anger was very stark on that one, no disagreement there. The Peddler was hung up on Qiwi Lisolet, even if he couldn't admit it to himself.

The signs of anger receded. Vinh licked his lips, a gesture that might have been nervousness. But the glyphs across the top of Nau's huds said, Subject is curious. Vinh said, "It's just that I don't see the similarities between Pham Nuwen's life and Emergent values. Sure, Pham Nuwen was not born a Peddler, but more than anyone he made us what we are today. Look at the Qeng Ho archives, his life-"

"Oh, I have. They're a bit scattered, don't you think?"

"Well, he was the great traveler. I doubt he ever cared much about the historians."

"Mr. Vinh, Pham Nuwen valued the regard of history as much as any of the giants. I think-I know-your Qeng Ho archives have been carefully gardened, probably by your own Family. But you see, someone as great as Pham Nuwen attracted other historians-from the worlds he changed, from other spacefaring cultures. Their stories also float across the ages, and I've collected all that passed through this end of Human Space. He is a man I have always tried to emulate. Your Pham Nuwen was no lickspittle trader. Pham Nuwen was a Bringer of Order, a conqueror. Sure, he used your Trader techniques, the deception and the bribery. But he never shrank from threats and raw violence when that was necessary."

"I-" The diagnostics painted an exquisite combination of anger and surprise and doubt across Vinh's face, just the mix that Nau would have estimated.

"I can prove it, Mr. Vinh." He spoke key words into the air. "I've just transferred some of our archives to your personal domain. Take a look. These are unvarnished, non-Qeng Ho views of the man. A dozen little atrocities. Read the true story of how he ended the Strentmannian Pogrom, of how he was betrayed at Brisgo Gap. Then let's talk again."

Amazing. Nau had not intended to speak so bluntly, but the evoked effects were so interesting. They exchanged a few meaningless sentences, and the meeting was over. Red shimmered around Vinh's hands, symptoms of an invisible trembling, as he approached the door.

Nau sat quietly for a moment after the Peddler was gone. He stared off into the distance, but in fact he was reading from his huds. The snoops' report was a stream of colored glyphs against the landscape of Diamond One. He would read the report carefully...later. First, there were his own thoughts to get in order. The localizer diagnostics were almost magical. Without them, he knew he would have scarcely noticed Vinh's agitation. More important, without the diagnostics I wouldn't have been able to guide the conversation, zeroing in on the topics that needled Vinh. So yes, active manipulation did appear feasible; this wasn't simply a snoop technique. And now he knew that Ezr Vinh had some substantial portion of his self-image bound up in the Qeng Ho fairy tales. Could the boy actually be turned by a different vision of those stories? Before now, he never would have believed it. With these new tools, maybe...

THIRTY-SEVEN.

"We should have another face-to-face talk."

"...Okay. Look, Pham. I don't believe these lies that Nau dumped on me."

"Yeah, well everyone gets to write their own version of the past. The main thing is, I want to give you some drill about handling that sort of ambush interview."

"I'm sorry. For a few seconds, I thought he was on to us." The boy's voice was faint in Pham's ear. Ezr Vinh had become quite good with their secret comm link; good enough that Pham could hear the stunned tone in his voice.

"You did okay, though. You'll do better with some feedback training." They talked a few moments more, setting up a time and a cover story. Then the tenuous link was broken, and Pham was left to think on the day's events.

Damn. Today had been a disaster just barely avoided...or just temporarily avoided. Pham floated in the darkened room, but his vision flitted across the gap of kilometers, to Diamond One and Hammerfest. The localizers were everywhere there now, and they were operational-though the MRI units in the Focus clinic fried any nearby localizers almost immediately. Getting live localizers onto Hammerfest was the breakthrough he had waited years for, but-If I hadn't meddled with the diagnostics coming off Vinh, we could have lost everything. Pham had known how the Podmaster might use his new toys; similar, if less intense, things had been going on in the temp for years. What he hadn't guessed was that Nau would have such deadly good luck in his choice of words. For nearly ten seconds, the boy had been sure that Nau had figured out everything. Pham had damped the snoops' report on that reaction, and Vinh himself had covered for it pretty well, but...

I never thought that Tomas Nau would know so much about me. Over the years, the Podmaster had often claimed to be a great admirer of "the historical giants," and he always included Pham Nuwen on his list. It had always seemed a transparent attempt to establish a common ground with the Qeng Ho. But now, Pham wasn't sure. While Tomas Nau had been busy "reading" Ezr Vinh, Pham had run similar diagnostics on the Podmaster. Tomas Nau really did admire his notion of the historical Pham Nuwen! Somehow, the monster thought he and Pham Nuwen were alike. He called me a "Bringer of Order." That rang a strange resonance. Though Pham had never thought to use the term, it was almost what he wished of himself. But we are nothing alike. Tomas Nau kills and kills and it is for himself. All I ever wanted was an end to killing, an end to barbarism. We are different! Pham stuffed the absurdity back in its bottle. The really amazing thing was that Nau had so much of the true story. For the last 10Ksec, Pham had watched over Vinh's shoulder as the boy read through much of it. Even now, he was trickling the whole database out of Vinh's domain and into the distributed memory of the localizer net. Over the next Msec, he would study the whole thing.

What he had seen so far was...interesting. Much of it was even true. But whether truth or lie, it was not the awed mythology that Sura Vinh had left in the Qeng Ho histories. It was not the lie that covered Sura's ultimate treachery. And how will Ezr Vinh take it? Pham had already been much too open with Vinh. Vinh was totally inflexible about Focus; he just wouldn't stop whining about the zipheads. It was strange. In his life, Pham had blithely lied to crazies and villains and Customers and even Qeng How...but playing up to Vinh's obsession left him exhausted. Vinh just didn't understand the miracle that Focus could make.

And there were things in Nau's archive that would make it very difficult for Pham to disguise his true goals from the boy.

Pham dipped back into Nau's version of history, followed one story and then another, swore at the lies that made him out to be a monster...winced when the story was the truth, even if his actions had been the best he could do. It was strange to see his real face again. Some of these videos had to be real. Pham could almost feel the words of those speeches flowing up his throat and out his lips. It brought back memories: the high years, when almost every destination had brought him into contact with Traders who understood what could be made of an interstellar trading culture. Radio had outpaced him and delivered his message with good effect. And less than a thousand years after Little Prince Pham had been given away to the traveling merchants, his life plan was close to success. The idea of a true Qeng Ho had spread across most of Human Space. From worlds on the Far Side that he might never know, to the tilled and retilled heart of Human Space-even on Old Earth-they had heard his message, they had seen his vision of an organization durable enough and powerful enough to stop the wheel of fate. Yes, many of them saw nothing more than Sura had. These were the "practical minds," only interested in making great wealth, insuring the benefit to themselves and their Families. But Pham had thought then-and Lord, I still want to believe now-that the majority believed in the greater goal that Pham himself preached.

Across a thousand years of real time, Pham had left the message, the plan for a Meeting more spectacular than any meeting before, a place and a time where the new Qeng Ho would declare the Peace of Human Space, would agree to serve that cause. It had been Sura Vinh who set the place: Namqem.

True, Namqem was well on the coreward side of Human Space, but it was near the center of heavy Qeng Ho activity. The Traders who could most certainly participate were in relatively easy reach; they would need less than one thousand years of lead time. Those were the reasons that Sura said. And all the time she smiled her old disbelieving smile, as if humoring poor Pham. But Pham had believed he would be given his chance at Namqem.

In the end, there was another reason for agreeing to meet at Namqem. Sura had traveled so little; she had always been the planner at the center of Pham's schemes. Decades and centuries had passed. Even with occasional coldsleep and the best medical technology in all Human Space, Sura Vinh was now insupportably old, five hundred years of life? six hundred? In the last century before the Meeting, her messages made her seem so very old. If they didn't have the Meeting at Namqem, maybe Sura would never see the success of what Pham had worked for. Maybe Sura would never see how Pham was right. She was the only one I totally trusted. I set myself up for her.

And Pham drowned in an old, old rage, remembering...

The mother of all meetings. In a sense, the entire method and mythology that Pham and Sura had invented had been dedicated to this single moment. So it wasn't surprising that the arrivals were timed with unprecedented precision. Instead of trickling in over a decade or two, five thousand ramscoops from more than three hundred worlds were falling inward toward the Namqem system, all to arrive within an Msec of one another.

Some had left port less than a century earlier, coming in from Canberra and Torma. There were ships from Strentmann and Kielle, from worlds with ethnicities that by now were almost different species. Some had launched from so far away that they had only heard of the Meeting by radio. There were three ships from Old Earth. Not all the Attendees were true Traders; some were government missions hoping for the solutions in Pham's message. Perhaps a third of the visitors' departure worlds would have fallen from civilization in the time it took for voyage and return.

Such a meeting could not be moved or postponed. The opening of Hell itself could not successfully deflect it. Still, decades out from port, Pham had known that Hell was cracking open for the people of Namqem.

Pham's Flag Captain was only forty years old. He had seen a dozen worlds, and he should have known better. But he had been born on Namqem. "They've been civilized since before you first showed up out of the Dark, sir. They know how to make things work. How can this be?" He looked disbelievingly at the analysis that had arrived with Sura Vinh's latest transmission.

"Sit down, Sammy." Pham kicked a chair out from the wall, gestured for the other to settle himself. "I've read the reports, too. The symptoms are classic. The last decade, the rate of system deadlocks has steadily increased throughout Namqem. See here, thirty percent of business commuting between the outer moons is in locked state at any given time." All the hardware was in working order, but the system complexity was so great that vehicles could not get the go-ahead.

Sammy Park was one of Pham's best. He understood the reasons behind all the synthetic beliefs of the new Qeng Ho-and he still embraced them. He could make a worthy successor to Pham and Sura-maybe better than Pham's oldest children, who were often as cautious as their mother. But Sammy was seriously rattled: "Surely the governance of Namqem understands the danger? They know everything Humankind has ever learned about stability-and they have better automation than we! Surely, in another few dozen Msecs we'll hear that they've reoptimized."

Pham shrugged, not admitting to his own disbelief. Namqem was so good, for so long. Aloud he said, "Maybe. But we know they've had thirty years to work a fix." He waved at Sura's report. "And still the problems get worse." He saw the look on Park's face, and softened his voice. "Sammy, Namqem has had peace and freedom for almost four thousand years. There's not another Customer civilization in all Human Space that can say that. But that's the point. Without help, even they can't go on forever."

Sammy's shoulders hunched down. "They've avoided the killing disasters. They haven't had war plagues or nuclear war. The governance is still flexible and responsive. There are just these Lord-be-damned technical problems."

"They are technical symptoms, Sammy, of problems I'm sure the governance understands very well." And can't do a thing about. He remembered back to the cynicism of Gunnar Larson. In a way this conversation was rumbling down the same dead-end street. But Pham Nuwen had had a lifetime to think of solutions. "The flexibility of the governance is its life and its death. They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point..."

"But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."

Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

"Okay, I know." Sammy looked away, and Pham synched his huds to follow what the younger man was seeing: Tarelsk and Marest, the two largest moons. Two billion people on each. They were gleaming disks of city lights as they slid across the face of their mother world-which itself was the largest park in Human Space. When the end finally came to Namqem, it would be a steep, swift collapse. Namqem solar system was not as naturally desolate as the pure asteroidal colonies of the early days of the Space Age...but the megalopolis moons required high technology to sustain their billions. Large failures there could easily spread into a system-wide war. It was the sort of debacle that had sterilized more than one of Humankind's homes. Sammy watched the scene, peaceful and wondrous-and now years out-of-date. And then he said, "I know. This is everything you've been telling people, all the years I've been with the Qeng Ho. And for centuries before. Sorry Pham. I always believed...I just never thought my own birthplace would die, so soon."

"I...wonder." Pham looked across the command deck of his flag vessel and, in smaller windows, the command decks of the other thirty ships in his fleet. Here in midvoyage, there were only three or four people on each bridge. It was the dullest work in the universe. But the Nuwen fleet was one of the largest coming to the Meeting. More than ten thousand Qeng Ho slept in the holds of his ships. They had departed Terneu just over a century ago, and flew in the closest formation that wouldn't interfere with their ramfields. The farthest command deck was less than four thousand light-seconds from Pham's flag. "We're still twenty years' travel time from Namqem. That's a lot of time if we choose to spend it on-Watch. Maybe...this is an opportunity to prove that what I've been talking about can actually work. Namqem will likely be chaos by the time we arrive. But we are help from outside their planetary trap, and we are arriving in enough numbers to make a difference."

They were sitting on the command deck of Sammy's ship, the Far Regard. This bridge was almost busy, with five of the thirty command posts occupied. Sammy looked from post to post, and finally back at Pham Nuwen. Something like hope was spreading across his face. "Yes...the whole reason for the Meeting can be illustrated." On the side he was running scheduling programs, already caught up in the idea. "If we use contingency supplies, we can support almost a hundred on-Watch per ship, all the way to Namqem. That's enough to study the situation, come up with action plans. Hell, in twenty years, we should be able to coordinate with the other fleets, too."

Sammy Park was all Flag Captain now. He stared into his calculations, twiddling the possibilities. "Yes. The Old Earth fleet is less than a quarter light-year from us. Half of all the Attendees are less than six light-years from us now, and of course that distance is decreasing. What about Sura and the Qeng Ho already in-system?"

Sura had put down roots over the centuries, but "Sura and company have their own resources. She'll survive." Sura understood the wheel of fate, even if she didn't believe it could be broken. She had moved her headquarters off Tarelsk a century before; Sura's "temp" was a hoary palace in the asteroid belt. She would guess what Pham was about to try. The wave front of her analysis was probably headed in their direction even now. Maybe there really was a Lord of All Trade. There was certainly an Invisible Hand. The Meeting at Namqem would mean more than even he had imagined.

Year on year, the fleet of fleets converged upon Namqem. Five thousand threads of light, fireflies visible across light-years-thousands of light-years to decent telescopes. Year on year, the flares of their deceleration became tighter, a fine ball of thistledown in the windows of every arriving ship.

Five thousand ships; more than a million human beings. The ships held machines that could slag worlds. The ships held libraries and computer nets... And all together they were not a puff of thistledown compared to the power and resources of a civilization like Namqem. How could a puff of thistledown save a falling colossus? Pham had preached his answer to that question in person and across the Qeng Ho network. Local civilizations are all isolated traps. A simple disaster could kill them, but a little outside help might lead them to safety. And for the nonsimple cases-like Namqem-where generations of clever optimization finally crushed itself, even those disasters depended on the closed-system nature of sessile civilizations. A governance had too few choices, too many debts, and in the end it would be swept away by barbarism. An outside view, a new automation, that was something the Qeng Ho could supply. That was what Pham claimed would make the difference. Now he was going to get a chance to prove his point, not just argue it. Twenty years was not too much time to get ready.

In twenty years, Namqem's once gentle decline had gone beyond inconvenience, beyond economic recession. The governance had fallen three times now, each time replaced by a regime designed to be "more effective"-each time opening the way to more radical social and technical fixes, ideas that had failed on a hundred other worlds. And with each downward step, the plans of the approaching fleets became more precise.

People were dying now. A billion kilometers out from Namqem world, the fleets saw the beginnings of Namqem's first war. Literally saw it with their naked eyes: the explosions were in the gigatonne range, the destruction of a competing governance that had seceded with two-thirds of the outer planets' automated industry. After the detonations, only one-third of that industry remained, but it was firmly in control of the megalopolitan regimes.

Flag Captain Sammy Park reported at a meeting: "Alqin is trying to evacuate to the planetary surface. Maresk is on the verge of starvation; the pipeline from the outer system will empty out just a few days before we arrive."

"The stump governance on Tarelsk seems to think they're still running a going concern. Here is our analysis..." The new speaker's Nese was fluent; they had had twenty years now to synch their common language. This Fleet Captain was a young...man...from Old Earth. In eight thousand years, Old Earth had been depopulated four times. Without the existence of the daughter worlds, the human race would have gone extinct there long ago. What lived on Earth was strange now. None of their kind had been this far out from the center of Human Space before. But now, as fleets made their final approach into the Namqem system, the Old Earth ships were barely ten light-seconds from Pham's flag. They had participated as much as anyone in setting up what they all were calling the Rescue.