Qiwi Lisolet rose smoothly, stopped herself with a hand on the low ceiling. Gravity existed on Hammerfest, but it was barely good enough to keep the drinking bulbs on the table. "Interesting? I guess." She made a face. "But it's also a very irritating problem." Qiwi opened a deep pocket and pulled out a bundle of head-up displays—all tagged with "cleared-for-Peddler-use" seals. "Let's try out Kal Omo's toys." She passed them out to the various Watch managers. Ezr took one, smiled back at her shy grin. Qiwi was still child-short, but she was as compact and nearly as tall as an average Strentmannian adult. She was no longer a little girl, or even the devastated orphan of the Relighting. Qiwi had lived Watch-on-Watch in the years after the Relight; she had aged a full year for every year that passed. Since OnOff's light had faded to a more manageable level, she'd had some time off-Watch, but Ezr could see tiny creases beginning at the corners of her eyes.She's what now? Older than I am. The old playfulness sometimes showed even still, but she never teased Ezr anymore. And he knew the stories about Qiwi and Tomas Nau were true. Poor, damned Qiwi.
But Qiwi Lin Lisolet had become something more than Ezr ever expected. Now Qiwi balanced mountains.
She waited until they all were wearing their huds. Then: "You know I manage our halo-orbit around L1." Above the middle of the table, the rockpile suddenly materialized. A tiny Hammerfest stuck out of the jumble on Ezr's side; a taxi was just mooring on the high tower. The image was crisp, cutting precisely across the wall and people behind it. But when he turned his head quickly from the rockpile to Qiwi and back, the pile blurred slightly. The placement automation couldn't quite keep up with the motion, and the visual fraud failed. No doubt, Kal Omo's programmers had been forced to replace some of the optimizations. Still, what was left was close to Qeng Ho quality, the images separately coordinated in the field of each head-up display.
Dozens of tiny red lights appeared across the surface of the rockpile. "Those are the electric-jet emplacements"—and then even more yellow spots of light—"and that is the sensor grid." She laughed, as light and playful as he remembered. "Altogether it looks like a finite element solution grid, doesn't it? But then, that's just what it is, though the grid points are real machines collecting data. Anyway, my people and I have two problems. Either one of them is fairly easy: We need to keep the jumble in orbit around L1." The jumble shrank to a stylized symbol, tracing an everchanging Lissajous figure around the glyphL1. On one side hung Arachna; far away but on the same line was the OnOff star. "We have it set so we're always near the sun's limb as seen by the Spiders. It will be many years before they have the technology to detect us here....But the other goal of the stabilization is to keep Hammerfest and the remaining blocks of ocean ice and airsnow all in the shadow." Back to the original view of the jumble, but now the volatiles were marked in blue and green. Every year that precious resource shrank, consumed by the humans and by evaporation into space. "Unfortunately these two goals are somewhat inconsistent. The rubble pile isloose. Sometimes our L1 stationkeeping causes torques and the rocks slide."
"The rubble quakes," said Jau Xin.
"Yes. Down here at Hammerfest, you feel them all the time. Without constant supervision, the problem would be worse." The surface of the meeting table became a model of the juncture of Diamonds One and Two. Qiwi motioned across the blocks and a forty-centimeter swath of surface turned pink. "That's a shift that almost got away from us. But we can't afford the human resources to—"
Pham Trinli had sat through all this in silence, his eyes squinted down in a look of angry concentration. As Nau's original choice to manage the stabilization, Trinli had a long history of humiliation on this subject. Finally he exploded. "Crap. I thought you were going to spend some of the water, melt it into a glue you could inject between the Diamonds."
"We did that. It helps some, but—"
"But you still can't keep things settled, can you?" Trinli turned to Nau, and half rose from his chair. "Podmaster, I've told you before that I'm best for the job. The Lisolet girl knows how to run a dynamics program, and she works as hard as anyone—but she doesn't have any depth of experience."Depth of experience? How many years of hands-on does she need, old man?
But Nau just smiled at Trinli. No matter how absurd the idiot's contentions, Nau always invited him back. For a long time, Ezr had suspected it was some sadistic humor on the Podmaster's part.
"Well, then perhaps I should give you the job, Armsman. But consider, even now it would mean at least one-third time on-Watch." Nau's tone was courteous, but Trinli caught the dare in it. Ezr could just see the anger growing in the old man.
