Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky

“Look, Trixia, what’s got you down? Surely there’s nothing suspicious about the Emergents having nice quarters. Most of the evening you were your usual softheaded self”—she didn’t rise to the insult—“but then something happened. What did you notice?” He pushed off the ceiling to float closer to where she was seated against a wall divan.

“It… it was several little things, and—” She reached out to catch his hand. “You know I have an ear for languages.” Another quick smile. “Their dialect of Nese is so close to your broadcast standard that it’s clear they’ve bootstrapped off the Qeng Ho Net.”

“Sure. That all fits with their claims. They’re a young culture, crawling back from a bad fall.” Will I end up having to defend them? The Emergent offer had been reasonable, almost generous. It was the sort of thing that made any good Trader a little cautious. But Trixia had seen something else to worry about.

“Yes, but having a common language makes a lot of things difficult to disguise. I heard a dozen authoritarian turns of speech—and they didn’t seem to be fossil usages. The Emergents are accustomed to owning people, Ezr.”

“You mean slaves? This is a high-tech civilization, Trixia. Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.”

She squeezed his hand abruptly, not angry, not playful, but intense in a way he’d never seen with her before. “Yes, yes. But we don’t know all their kinks. We do know they play rough. I had a whole evening of listening to that reddish-blond fellow sitting beside you, and the pair that were on my right. The word ‘trade’ does not come easily to them. Exploitation is the only relationship they can imagine with the Spiders.”

“Hmm.” Trixia was like this. Things that slipped past him could make such a difference to her. Sometimes they seemed trivial even after she explained them. But sometimes her explanation was like a bright light revealing things he had never guessed. “…I don’t know, Trixia. You know we Qeng Ho can sound pretty, um, arrogant when the customers are out of earshot.”

Trixia looked away from him for a second, stared out at strange quaint rooms that had been her family’s home on Triland. “Qeng Ho arrogance turned my world upside down, Ezr. Your Captain Park busted open the school system, opened up the Forestry…. And it was just a side effect.”

“We didn’t force anyone—”

“I know. You didn’t force anyone. The Forestry wanted a stake in this mission, and delivering certain products was your price of admission.” She was smiling oddly. “I’m not complaining, Ezr. Without Qeng Ho arrogance I would never have been allowed into the Forestry’s screening program. I wouldn’t have my doctorate, and I wouldn’t be here. You Qeng Hoare gougers, but you are also one of the nicer things that has happened to my world.”

Ezr had been in coldsleep till the last year at Triland. The Customer details weren’t that clear to him, and before tonight Trixia had not been especially talkative about them. Hmm. Only one marriage proposal per Msec; he had promised her no more, but… He opened his mouth to say—

“Wait, you! I’m not done. The reason for saying all this now is that I have to convince you: There is arrogance and arrogance, and I can tell the difference. The people at that dinner sounded more like tyrants than traders.”

“What about the servers? Did they look like downtrodden serfs?”

“…No… more like employees. I know that doesn’t fit. But we aren’t seeing all the Emergents’ people. Maybe the victims are elsewhere. But either through confidence or blindness, Tomas Nau left their pain posted all over the walls.” She glared at his questioning look. “The paintings, damn it!”

Trixia had made a slow stroll of leaving the banquet hall, admiring each painting in turn. They were beautiful landscapes, either of groundside locations or very large habitats. Every one was surreal in lighting and geometry, but precise down to the detail of individual threads of grass. “Normal, happy people didn’t make those pictures.”

Ezr shrugged. “It looked to me like they were all done by the same person. They’re so good, I’ll bet they’re reproductions of classics, like Deng’s Canberran castlescapes.” A manic-depressive contemplating his barren future. “Great artists are often crazy and unhappy.”

“Spoken like a true Trader!”

He put his other hand across hers. “Trixia, I’m not trying to argue with you. Until this banquet, I was the untrusting one.”

“And you still are, aren’t you?” The question was intense, with no sign of playful intent.

“Yes,” though not as much as Trixia, and not for the same reasons. “It’s just a little too reasonable of the Emergents to share half the haul from their heavy lifters.” There must have been some hard bargaining behind that. In theory, the academic brainpower that the Qeng Ho had brought was worth as much as a few heavy lifters, but the equation was subtle and difficult to argue. “I’m just trying to understand what you saw, and what I missed….Okay, suppose things are as dangerous as you see them. Don’t you think Captain Park and the Committee are on to that?”

“So what do they think now? Watching your fleet officers on the return taxi, I got the feeling people are pretty mellow about the Emergents now.”

“They’re just happy we got a deal. I don’t know what the people on the Trading Committee think.”

“You could find out, Ezr. If this banquet has fooled them, you could demand some backbone. I know, I know: You’re an apprentice; there are rules and customs and blah blah blah. But your Familyowns this expedition!”

Ezr hunched forward. “Just a part of it.” This was also the first time she’d ever made anything of the fact. Until now both of them—Ezr, at least—had been afraid of acknowledging that difference in status. They shared the deep-down fear that each might simply be taking advantage of the other. Ezr Vinh’s parents and his two aunts owned about one-third of the expedition: two ramscoops and three landing craft. As a whole, the Vinh.23 Family owned thirty ships scattered across a dozen enterprises. The voyage to Triland had been a side investment, meriting only a token Family member. A century or three down the line he would be back with his family. By then, Ezr Vinh would be ten or fifteen years older. He looked forward to that reunion, to showing his parents that their boy had made good. In the meantime, he was years short of being able to throw his weight around. “Trixia, there’s a difference between owning and managing, especially in my case. If my parents were on this expedition, yes, they would have a lot of clout. But they’ve been ‘There and Back Again.’ I am far more an apprentice than an owner.” And he had the humiliations to prove it. One thing about a proper Qeng Ho expedition, there wasn’t much nepotism; sometimes just the opposite.

Trixia was silent for a long moment, her eyes searching back and forth across Ezr’s face. What next? Vinh remembered well Aunt Filipa’s grim advice about women who attach themselves to rich young Traders, who draw them in and then think to run their lives—and worse, run the Family’s proper business. Ezr was nineteen, Trixia Bonsol twenty-five. She might think she could simply make demands.Oh Trixia, please no.

Finally she smiled, a gentler, smaller smile than usual. “Okay, Ezr. Do what you must… but a favor? Think on what I’ve said.” She turned, reaching up to touch his face and gently stroke it. Her kiss was soft, tentative.

The Brat was waiting in ambush outside Ezr’s quarters.

“Hey, Ezr, I watched you last night.” That almost stopped him. She’s talking about the banquet. The Trading Committee had piped it back to the fleet.