Afterward she brought up the lights, and showed him how to do it in his sleeping hammock. And then again, with the lights out once more. After a long while, they floated exhausted in the dark. Peace and joy, and his arms were so full with her. Starlight was a magical faintness, that after enough time seemed almost bright. Bright enough to glint on Sura's eyes, to show the white of her teeth. She was smiling. "You're right about the stars," she said. "It is a bit humbling to see the sweep of the stars, to know how little we count."
Pham squeezed her gently, but was for the moment so satisfied he could actually think about what she said. "...Yes, it's scary. But at the same time, I look out and realize that with starships and coldsleep, we are outside and beyond them. We can make what we want of the universe."
The white of Sura's smile broadened. "Ah, Pham, maybe you haven't changed. I remember the first days of little Pham, when you could barely spit out an intelligible sentence. You kept insisting the Qeng Ho was an empire, and I kept saying we were simply traders, could never be anything more."
"I remember, but still I don't understand. Qeng Ho has been around for how long?"
"That name for ‘trading fleet'? Maybe two thousand years."
"That's longer than most empires."
"Sure, and part of the reason is, we're not an empire. It's our function that makes us seem everlasting. The Qeng Ho of two thousand years ago had a different language, had no common culture with now. I'm sure that things like it exist off and on through all Human Space. It's a process, not a government."
"Just a bunch of guys who happen to be doing similar things?"
"You got it."
Pham was silent for a while. She just didn't understand. "Okay. That is the way things are now. But don't you see the power that this gives you? You hold a high technology across hundreds of light-years of space and thousands of years of time."
"No. That's like saying the sea surf could rule a world: it's everywhere, it's powerful, and it seems to be coordinated."
"You could have a network, like the fleet network you used at Canberra."
"Lightspeed, Pham, remember? Nothing goes faster. I've no idea what traders are doing on the other side of Human Space—and at best that information would be centuries out of date. The most you've seen is networking across theReprise; you've studied how a small fleet network is run. I doubt you can imagine the sort of net it takes to support a planetary civilization. You'll see at Namqem. Every time we visit a place like that, we lose some crew. Life with a planetary network, where you can interact with millions of people with millisecond latencies—that is something you are still blind to. I'll bet when we get to Namqem, you'll leave, too."
"I'll never—"
But Sura was turning in his embrace, her breasts sliding across his chest, her hand sweeping down his belly, reaching. Pham's denial was lost in his body's electric response.
After that, Pham moved into Sura's cruise quarters. They spent so much time together that the other Watch standers teased him for "kidnapping our captain." In fact, the time with Sura Vinh was unending joy to Pham, but it was not just lust fulfilled. They talked and talked and argued and argued...and set the course of the rest of their lives.
And sometimes he thought of Cindi. Both she and Sura had come after him, lifting him to new awareness. They had both taught him things, argued with him, and bedeviled him. But they were as different as summer from winter, as different as a pond from an ocean. Cindi had stood up for him at the risk of her life, stood alone against all the King's men. In his wildest dreams, Pham could not imagine Sura Vinh committing her life against such odds. No, Sura was infinitely thoughtful and cautious. It was she who had analyzed the risks of remaining at Canberra, and concluded that success was unlikely—and persuaded enough others about those risks to wangle a ship from the fleet committee and escape Canberra space. Sura Vinh planned for the long haul, saw problems where no one else could see. She avoided risks—or confronted them with overwhelming force of her own. In Pham's confused moral pantheon, she was much less than Cindi...and much more.
Sura never bought his notion of a Qeng Ho star kingdom. But she didn't simply deny him; she showered him with books, with economics and histories that had eluded his decade-long reading schedule. A reasonable person would have accepted her point; there had been so many "common sense" things that Pham Nuwen had been wrong about before. But Pham still had his old stubbornness. Maybe it was Sura who wore blinders. "We could build an interstellar net. It would just be...slow."
Sura laughed. "Yeah! Slow. Like a three-way handshake would take a thousand years!"
