Pham didn't recognize the reference, but he got the other's point. "Magnate Larson, I wonder that you want to live long. You have everything figured out—a universe free of progress, where all things die and no good is accumulated." Pham's words were partly sarcasm, partly honest puzzlement. Gunnar Larson had opened windows, and the view was bleak.
Barely audible, a sigh. "You don't read very much, do you, son?" Strange. Pham did not think the other was probing anymore. There was something like sad amusement in the question.
"I read enough." Sura herself complained that Pham spent too much time with manuals. But Pham had started late, and had spent his whole life trying to catch up. So what if his education was a little skewed?
"You ask me the real point of it all. Each of us must take his own path on that, Fleet Captain. Different paths have their own advantages, their own perils. But for your own, human, sake...you should consider: Each civilization has its time. Each science has its limits. And each of us must die, living less than half a thousand years. If you truly understand those limits...then you are ready to grow up, to know what counts." He was silent for a while. "Yes...just listen to the peace. It's a gift to be able to do that. Too much time is spent in frenzied rushing. Listen to the breeze in thelestras. Watch Fred try to figure us out. Listen to the laughter of your children and your grandchildren. Enjoy the time you have, however it is given to you, and for however long."
Larson leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be staring out at the starless darkness that was the center of Trygve's disk. The arch of light from the eclipsed sun was dim and uniform all around the disk. The lightning had long since vanished; Pham guessed that seeing it was some function of viewing angle and the orientation of Trygve's thunderheads. "An example, Fleet Captain. Sit and feel and see: sometimes, at mid-eclipse, there is an especial beauty. Watch the middle of Trygve's disk." Seconds passed. Pham stared upward. Trygve's lower latitudes were normally so dark...but now: There was faint red, first so dim that Pham thought it might just be a figment of suggestibility. The light brightened slowly, a deep, deep red, like sword steel still too cold for the hammer. There were bands of dark crossing it.
"The light is from the depths of Trygve itself. You know we get some direct warming from the planet. Sometimes, when the cloud canyons are oriented just right and the upper storms are gone, we have a very deep view—and we can see its glow with the naked eye." The light came a little brighter. Pham glanced around the garden. Everything was in shades of red, but he could see more now than he had glimpsed in the lightning. The tall, stranded trees above the pond—they were part of the waterfall, guiding the water in extra swirls and pools. Clouds of flying things moved between the tree branches, and for a few moments they sang. Fred had climbed all the way out of the pond. He sat on multiple leg paddles and his shorter tentacles twitched upward, toward the light in the sky.
They watched in silence. Pham had observed Trygve with multispec on the way in from the asteroids. He wasn't seeing anything now that was news to him. The whole show was just a happenstance of geometry and timing. And yet...being tied to a single place, on a course that was determined beyond human control, he could see how Customers might be impressed when the universe chose to reveal something. It was ridiculous, but he could feel some of the awe himself.
And then Trygve's heart was dark again and the singing in the trees died away; the whole show had lasted less than one hundred seconds.
It was Larson who broke the silence. "I'm sure we can do business, my young-old man. In a measure I shouldn't reveal, we do want your medical technology. But still, I would be grateful for your answer to my original question. What will you do with the Larson localizers? Among the unsuspecting, they are an espionage miracle. Abused, they lead to ubiquitous law enforcement, and a quick end to civilization. Who will you sell them to?"
