Just now, it was early evening. The crescent of Namqem hung low in the sky; the lights of the Tarelsk business district rivaled the mother world's glow. The Vinh & Mamso shipyards would rise in another Ksec or so. Vinh & Mamso were probably the largest yards in Human Space. Yet even that was a small part of their Families' wealth. And beyond that—stretching ever more tenuously to the limits of Human Space, but growing still—was the cooperative wealth of the Qeng Ho. He and Sura had founded the greatest trading culture in the history of all time. That was how Sura saw it. That was all she ever saw. It was all she ever wanted. Sura didn't mind that she wouldn't live in the era of their final success...because she thought it would never come.
So Pham stilled the tears that waited behind his eyes. He slipped his arms gently around Sura, and kissed her neck. "Yes, I know," he finally said.
Pham postponed his departure from Namqem for two years, five. He stayed so long that the Grand Schedule itself was broken. There would be appointments missed. Any more delay and the Plan itself might fail. And when he finally left Sura, something died inside him. Their partnership survived, even their love, in some abstract way. But a chasm of time had opened between them and he knew they could never bridge it again.
By the time he had lived one hundred years, Pham Nuwen had seen more than thirty solar systems, a hundred cultures. There were Traders who had seen more, but not many. Certainly Sura, huddled in planning mode back on Namqem, never saw what Pham did. Sura had only books and histories, reports from far away.
For sessile civilizations, even space-faring ones, nothing lasted forever. It was something of a miracle that the human race had survived long enough to escape Earth. There were so many ways that an intelligent race could make itself extinct. Deadlocks and runaways, plagues, atmosphere catastrophes, impact events—those were the simplest dangers. Humankind had lived long enough to understand some of the threats. Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, it ossified and politics carried it into a fall. Pham Nuwen had been born on Canberra in the depths of a dark age. He knew now that the disaster had been mild by some standards—after all, the human race had survived on Canberra even though it lost its high technology. There were worlds that Pham visited multiple times during his first hundred years. Sometimes, it was centuries between the visits. He saw the utopia that had been Neumars fade into overpopulated dictatorship, the ocean cities becoming slums for billions. Seventy years later, he came back to a world with a population of one million, a world of small villages, of savages with painted faces and hand-axes and songs of heartbreak. The voyage would have been a bust, if not for the chants of Vilnios. But Neumars was lucky compared to the dead worlds. Old Earth had been recolonized from scratch four times since the diaspora began.
There had to be a better way, and every new world Pham saw made him more sure that he knew that better way.Empire. A government so large that the failure of an entire solar system would be a manageable disaster. The Qeng Ho trading culture was a start. It would become the Qeng Ho trading empire...and someday a true, governing empire. For the Qeng Ho were in a unique position. At its peak, a Customer civilization possessed extraordinary science—and sometimes made marginal improvements over the best that had ever existed before. Most often, these improvements died when the civilization died. The Qeng Ho, however—they went on forever, patiently gathering the best that could be found. To Sura, that was the Qeng Ho's greatest trading edge.
To Pham Nuwen, it was more.Why should we trade back all that welearn? Some, yes. That is largely how we make our living. But let us takethe glittering peaks of all human progress—and hold them for the goodof all .
That was how the "Qeng Ho" localizers had come to be. Pham had been aground on Trygve Ytre, as far from Namqem as he had ever voyaged. The people were not even from the same ur-stock as the humans of familiar parts of Human Space.
Trygve's sun was one of those dim little M stars, the vermin of the colonizable galaxy. There were dozens of such stars for every one that was like Old Earth's sun—and most had planets. They were dangerous places to settle, the stellar ecosphere so narrow that a civilization without technology could not exist. In the early millennia of Humankind's conquest of space, that fact had been ignored, and a number of such worlds had been colonized. Ever optimistic, these humans, thinking their technology would last forever. And then at the first Fall, millions of people were left on a world of ice—or a world of fire, if the planet was on the inner side of their star's ecosphere.
