Even half a day ago, knowing what had happened to Trixia would have put him in a rage beyond reason. Now that rage choked on his shame. Ezr Vinh had had a hand in the deaths aboard theFar Treasure. If Jimmy had been a little more "successful," all those on Hammerfest might be dead too. Was being foolish, and supporting foolish, violent people—was that as evil as committing a treacherous ambush?No, no, no! And yet, in the end, Jimmy had killed a good fraction of those who had survived the ambush.And I must make amends. Now I must somehow explain Focus to my people,and do it so they can accept it, so what is left of our mission can survive.
Ezr choked on a sob. He was supposed to convince others to accept what he would have died to prevent. In all his schooling, all his reading, all his nineteen years of life, he had never imagined there could be anything so difficult.
A tiny light swung through the middle distance. Branches shuffled aside. Someone had entered the park, was bumbling nearer the central glade. The light flashed briefly in Vinh's face, then went out.
"Aha. I figured you might go to ground." It was Pham Trinli. The old man grabbed a low-growing branch and settled on the moss near Vinh. "Brace up, young fellow. Diem's heart was in the right place. I helped him out as best I could, but he was a careless hothead—remember how he sounded? I never thought he was that foolish, and now a lot of people got killed. Well, shit happens."
Vinh turned toward the sound of the words; the other's face was a grayish blob in the twilight. For a moment, Vinh teetered on the edge of violence. It would feel sogood to pulp that face. Instead, he settled a little deeper in the dark and let his breath steady. "Yeah. It happens."Andmaybe some will happen to you. Surely Nau had the park bugged.
"Courage. I like that." In the darkness, Vinh couldn't tell whether the other was smiling or if the fatuous compliment was meant seriously. Trinli slid a little closer and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Don't take it so hard. Sometimes you have to go along to get along. And I think I can manipulate that Nau fellow. The speech he gave—did you notice? After all the death Jimmy caused, Nau wasaccommodating. I swear, he cribbed his talk from something in our own history."
So even in hell, there are clowns. Pham Trinli, the aging martinet, whose idea of subtle conspiracy was a whispered chat in a temp's central park. Trinli was so totally clueless. Worse, he had so many thingsbackwards... .
They sat in the near-total darkness for some seconds, and Pham Trinli remained mercifully silent. The guy's stupidity was like a load of rock dumped into the pool of Vinh's despair. It stirred things up. The absurdities gave him something to hit on besides himself. Nau's speech...accommodating? In a sense. Nau was the injured party in this. But they were all injured parties. Cooperation was the only way out now. He thought back over Nau's words.Huh. Some of the phrases really were borrowed, from Pham Nuwen's speech at Brisgo Gap. Brisgo Gap was a shining high point in the history of the Qeng Ho, where the Traders had saved a high civilization and billions of lives. As much as something so large could be tied to a single point in space-time, Brisgo Gap was the origin of the modern Qeng Ho. The similarities with the present situation were about nil... except that there, too, people from all over had cooperated, had prevailed in the face of terrible treachery.
Pham Nuwen's speech had been 'cast across Human Space many times during the last two thousand years. It wasn't surprising Tomas Nau would know it. So he'd spliced in a phrase here and there, sought a common background...except that Tomas Nau's notion of "cooperation" meant accepting Focus and what had been done to Trixia Bonsol. Vinh realized that some part of his mind had felt the similarities, had been moved by them. But seeing the cribbing laid out cold made things different. It was all so pat, and it ended with Ezr Vinh having to accept...Focus.
