Pham shifted in his sleep hammock. Thinking about Ytre and Larson always left him uneasy. It was wasted time...except tonight. Tonight he needed the mood of the time after that meeting. He needed something of the kinesthetic memory of dealing with the localizers. There must be dozens in this room by now. What was the pattern of motion and body state that would trigger them to talk back to him? Pham pulled the hammock wrap fully over his hands. Inside, his fingers played at a phantom keyboard. Surely that was too obvious. Until he had rapport, nothing like keystrokes should have an effect. Pham sighed, changed breathing and pulse yet again...and recaptured the awe of his first practice sessions with the Larson localizers.
A pale blue light, bluer than blue, blinked once near the edge of his vision. Pham opened his eyes a slit. The room was midnight dark. The light from the sleep panel was too faint to reveal colors. Nothing moved except the slow drifting of his hammock in the ventilator's breeze. The blue light had been from elsewhere. From inside his optic nerve. Pham closed his eyes, repeated the breathing exercise. The blue, blinking light appeared once more. It was the effect of a localizer array's synthesized beam, guiding off the two he had set by his temple and in his ear. As communication went, it was very crude, no more impressive than the random sparkles that most people ignore all the time. The system was programmed to be very cautious about revealing itself. This time he kept his eyes closed, and didn't change the level of his breath or the calmness of his pulse. He curled two fingers toward his palm. A second passed. The light blinked again, responding. Pham coughed, waited, moved his right arm just so. The blue light blinked: One, Two, Three...it was a pulse train, counting binary for him. He echoed back to it, using the codes that he had set up long ago.
He was past the challenge/response module.He was in! The lights that flickered behind his eyes were almost random stimuli. It would take Ksecs to train the localizer net to the precision that this sort of display could have. The optic nerve was simply too large, too complex for instantly clear video. No matter. The net was reliably talking to him now. The old customizations were coming out of hiding. The localizers had established his physical parameters; he could talk to them in any number of ways from now on. He had almost 3Msec remaining in his current Watch. That should be time enough to do the absolutely necessary, to invade the fleet net and establish a new cover story. What would it be? Something shameful, yes. Some shameful reason for "Pham Trinli" to play the buffoon all these years. A story that Nau and Brughel could relate to and think to use as a lever against him. What?
Pham felt a smile steal across his face.Zamle Eng, may your slave-trading soul rot in Hell. You caused me so much grief. Maybe you can dome some posthumous good.
TWENTY-THREE
"The Children's Hour of Science." What an innocent name. Ezr returned from his long off-Watch to find that it had become his personal nightmare.Qiwi promised; how could she let this happen? But every live show was more of a circus than the last.
And today's might be the worst yet. With good luck it might also be the last.
Ezr drifted into Benny's about a thousand seconds before show time. Till the last moment, he'd intended to watch it from his room, but masochism had won another round. He settled into the crowd and listened silently to the chatter.
Benny's booze parlor had become the central institution of their existence at L1. The parlor was sixteen years old now. Benny himself was on a twenty-five-percent duty cycle; he and his father shared the running of the place with Gonle Fong and others. The old wallpaper had blistered in places, and in some places the illusion of three-dimensional view was lost. Everything here was unofficial, either appropriated from other sites in the L1 cloud, or made from diamonds and ice and airsnow. Ali Lin had even come up with a fungal matrix that allowed the growing of incredible wood, complete with grain and something like growth rings. Sometime during Ezr's long absence, the bar and the walls had all been paneled in dark, polished wood. It was a comfortable place, almost what free Qeng Ho might make... .
The parlor's tables were carved with the names of people you might not have seen for years, people on Watch shifts that didn't overlap your own. The picture above the bar was a continuously updated copy of Nau's Watch Chart. As with most things, the Emergents used standard Qeng Ho notation. A single glance at the chart and you could see how many Msecs—objective time or personal—it would be before you ever met any particular person.
